


Northern Star

by heartofthesunrise



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1970s, Car Accidents, F/M, M/M, Major Character Injury, alternate universe - fleetwood mac, this is a whole ass mess it's narry endgame though
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2019-07-06 18:36:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 40,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15891720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: “Horan and Styles?” Harry offered. “Bit overdone, feel like everybody and their mother’s in a two-surname folk duo.”“You’re right, you’re right,” Niall said. “Harry and Niall it is.”-A band au where some things are the same but they all come about a little differently.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS A WIP, PROCEED WITH CAUTION... Here's the first chapter of _Northern Star,_ aka, Niall covered "Dreams" and Harry covered "The Chain" and I had a lot of stupid feelings about it. Primary influence is the Fleetwood Mac origin story but if you look closely (read: not that closely) you'll catch a lot of other 70s rock history, especially Queen, my forever boys. 
> 
> Big ups to Ezra who listened to me complain about this, like, a lot, and made fan art of it when it was still only a concept, and watched the Fleetwood Mac _Rumours_ Classic Albums documentary with me very patiently while I struggled. Rebloggable on tumblr [here.](https://warpedtourniall.tumblr.com/post/177719161306/horan-and-styles-harry-offered-bit-overdone)

Just before our love got lost you said  
I am as constant as the Northern Star, and I said  
Constantly in the darkness, where’s that at?  
If you want me I’ll be in the bar

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You” (1971)

 

I know in my heart  
You’re not a constant star

One Direction, “Fool’s Gold” (2014)

-

In the years since Navigator released their final album, Niall has often been pressed to tell the story of how the band came together. Because of the way he is - “Because you’re a _virgo,”_ Harry insists - he’s got it down to a science.

“Harry and I were performing, y’know, as a duo and we weren’t getting much traction. And Navigator were doing great but they’d lost their frontman, they were looking for a way to keep it all together, right? And we all, there was one night when both groups were on the bill at the Marquee, Haz and I were opening for them. The Irish Marquee, mind you - the better Marquee, some might say. They were on as a three piece. Bit of a mess, if I’m honest.”

This is where he always pauses for laughter.

“Nah, you know Zayn. He was holding it together. He’s like that.” He pauses again, waits for the audience’s cooing to subside. “Anyway they asked us round for a drink, and there’s me and Harry in our dressing room, more of a closet than anything, panicking because we’ve not got anything to wear, thinking they’ll ask us to open a few shows on a tour or something, give us our big break - “ He laughs, himself, here, just remembering. “And when we’re all sorted, get down to the bar and there’s Zayn, beautiful as anything, asking us if we’d like to join up. And. Well, you know the rest.”

Truth be told it was a messier start than that, and earlier - if Niall’s being honest, it doesn’t even start with the five of them meeting. It starts somewhere before he’s even in the picture, with Liam driving up to Doncaster and picking up Louis in his bratty little GTO that barely fit their gear, the two of them heading west to Bradford and playing all day before making the long journey home again. How they’d met, even, a story Niall only vaguely knows - at a show, Moby Grape or somebody like that.

And then it sort of starts with him and Haz, the record they’d put out together back before they’d even thought about being more than a duo. The messy truth of it, when he thinks about his own place in Navigator, begins on the grotty floor of an art studio in Dublin where Harry’s taking a painting course and he’s hanging around trying to find a band.

 

_ 1970, Dublin _

 

“Haz,” Niall sing-songed as he strummed through a few chord changes. “Sing me something for this.”

Harry was perched on a stool in front of the easel, a dripping paintbrush between his teeth and one hand out in front of him, sketching on a heavy sheet of Bristol. He made a noise that might’ve been intended as words, but around the brush, emerged as a meaningless string of emphatic syllables.

“That’s beautiful, that is,” Niall said, strumming again. For his part, he was sprawled in a chair against the concrete wall, trying to escape the late summer heat, and trying not to move too much. Being Harry Styles’s only friend in Ireland made Niall a frequent and only partially compliant subject of his paintings, but it was nice - it felt nice - to be helpful.

“Experimental, innit,” Harry said after he’d pulled the brush from his mouth and turned to his palette. “We’ll do a whole record of you fuckin’ off and me mumbling over it, be the next Velvets.”

Niall laughed.

“Stop moving!” Harry said, brandishing the pencil and brush in one fist. “I’m almost there, just trying to get the colors right.”

“Alright, alright,” Niall acquiesced. He stilled his hands on the frets and tried not to pull a face. Harry glanced up at him and daubed a watery red into whatever he was mixing, really grinding the brush down into it before testing it out on a scrap of spare bristol. It was covered in similar slashes and blots of color, Harry never quite wanting to commit to a value for his larger pieces. He held the scrap up, comparing the hue to the physical reality of Niall, bored out of his skull but perfectly motionless, before reaching for his jar of water and setting about diluting the paint.

“Y’know,” Niall said, trying to keep still. “There’s photography classes here, could be a one-and-done affair. Harry Styles, rock photographer doesn’t sound half bad.”

Harry gave him a one-shouldered shrug. Niall recognized the motion of his other arm, knew he was applying a thin glaze of paint all over the page. Christ, he was going to take forever.

“Just saying,” Niall continued. He always let his mouth run away with him when Harry was making him sit still. “Could probably photograph other people easier, too - get yourself a proper portfolio. Sure your teachers are sick of looking at me.”

Harry was mixing again, this time with a heavy blue pigment that Niall thought might be meant for the stripes on his shirt, or the shadowy wall behind him. “Just need to get myself some more friends,” Harry said slowly. “More patient ones.” He paused. “Look up at me?”

Niall did as he was told, tipping his chin towards Harry. It had been uncomfortable, at first, to see the intense way Harry stared at him while he was painting. It was still uncomfortable, truth be told, but it was familiar, too, in its way.

After a long moment, Harry set his brush down. “Okay, I need to let this layer dry. You can move.”

Niall stretched his legs out in front of him. He manoeuvred the guitar into a more comfortable position on his lap and set about playing an arrangement of Tam Lin he’d been working on, marking up his Bronson anthology of the Child Ballads.

It wasn’t that he was crap at lyrics, or writing, or anything. He liked writing music for the words Harry came up with better, though, and they were still… They’d been playing music together for about six months, and he was still trying to parse their sound. There was a vision he had, of the two of them playing some iconic club - the Whisky, maybe, or the Fillmore West - just with harmonized vocals and his guitar, and he’d been trying to realize it ever since.

“Sing Tam Lin with me,” he said, circling the fiddly little guitar bit back to the beginning and trying to give Harry an intro.

Harry was dragging his easel over to the window to dry the paint in the sun, and he stumbled over the first line and laughed through the second. Niall played through the phrase, bringing it back around. This one, he wanted them to really get right someday.

“Why do you like that one so much anyway?” Harry asked, settling the portrait of Niall directly in a slat of late afternoon sunlight. “Bit of a cliché, innit? We could do any of the Child Ballads, or - don’t hit me - we could do none of the Child Ballads - “

“It’s just nice,” Niall said, gently. He slowed down the chords, plucking them in stilted arpeggios instead. Watching Harry go back to mixing another wash for the painting. “Hold me tight and fear me not,” he continued, half-singing, “and I will be your own true love. It’s lovely. I can’t think of a better way to say it.”

“Yeah?” Harry was peering at him, trying to peel away some of the colors from him with his eyeballs, intense. “Like - what, like you think you scare girls? Hate to break it to you, mate, but you’re an absolute peach. Nothing to worry about there.”

“No, I know,” Niall said. “More like… Don’t laugh, okay? More like, if I was ever. I don’t know, if it ever went really wrong for me. If I became, like, some kind of spitting Syd Barrett acid casualty or like. Y’know, like somebody who knew me could love me back into myself, despite it all.”

Niall could feel the obvious flush high on his cheeks. He felt exposed, somehow. As if Harry’d caught him out in something embarrassing - worse than loving an old folk song, at least. Maybe it’d be better if Harry did laugh.

He didn’t, though.

“Okay,” he said, in his slow, deep voice. “I get that, I think.” He stared into his palette, moving pigment around. He picked up a blob of dark brown with the point of his brush and began to mix it in, to dilute it. To test it and hold it up, see how it looked beside Niall’s hair. His tone betrayed what he wasn’t saying, but Niall knew him well enough, by now. Not sure that’s how it works, mate. Sometimes when you’re gone, you’re gone.

“Besides, I think I got us an opening slot for the Halloween jam Bressie’s putting together. Can’t hurt to have a little mood music.” Niall wasn’t avoiding Harry’s gaze as much as he was coincidentally not meeting it. “Y’know, for the girls off to pull their true loves from faerie steeds at midnight.”

Harry was already reaching for the top lid of his palette. “Well we’d better get it ready, then,” he said, and this time, when Niall reached the top of the verse, Harry joined in seamlessly.

-

The thing was, Niall wasn’t pushing for them to be some folk revivalist group. He wasn’t stupid, he knew that scene was dying. And he was no Bert Jansch, and Harry was more Mick Jagger than Jacqui McShee anyway. When he’d been wheedling Bressie about the opening slot at the Halloween jam he’d been pressed into describing them and had settled, regrettably, on “The British-Irish answer to Simon and Garfunkel” which was probably an insult to all parties involved.

But Niall loved harmony most of all, and had sought Harry out both for his voice - warm and deep, where his own could be reedy and taut - and for his personality, his slow, silly calm that balanced Niall’s propensity to overdo things. And because Harry’d been the first person he’d talked about music to in Dublin - really talked - and had been willing to maybe come sing a few Stones tunes with him on a Saturday afternoon.

It had been a bit of a shock, really, to learn that Harry wrote lyrics, and that they were obtuse and delicious to sing, stuff that pushed him over into strange jazz chords, knuckle-breaking rock riffs, bluesy stuff he’d grown up loving and lost somewhere in his teens. He loved writing with Harry. It felt a bit girly, really, how much he wanted to tell Harry he was grateful to him for his words. How he wanted some assurance that Harry was around for more than a laugh, might actually make a go of it. He was in school, yeah, he was painting, but… Weren’t half those art students just waiting for bands to turn up and spirit them away, anyway?

They didn’t even have a proper band name. They didn’t even have enough people to be a band.

He asked Harry about it the next time they were hanging around Harry’s studio space, literally watching paint dry. It was the same portrait - Harry’d done something strange with the colors, all muted browns and greens, like Niall was slumped in the half-light of some forest someplace. It made him think of their conversation, about Tam Lin.

“What are we going to call ourselves?” he asked. “Bressie’s putting together the fliers, needs a name by tomorrow.”

Harry shrugged. “Dunno, thought we’d just. Y’know. Niall Horan and Harry Styles. Right?” He peered over at Niall. “We could go just first names if you’re feeling cheeky.”

“Right. Yeah, maybe.” They were working on a few songs they’d been trying to get together for the gig, and that was the more important thing, honestly. Of course they’d just use their names. Everybody just used their names, when they were a duo. He’d pitched them as a fucking Simon and Garfunkel thing, for God’s sake.

“Horan and Styles?” Harry offered. “Bit overdone, feel like everybody and their mother’s in a two-surname folk duo.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” Niall said. “Harry and Niall it is.”

Harry frowned. “We’re going alphabetical?”

“Haz, if you don’t accept top billing when it’s offered to you, you’re never going to get anywhere.” He wanted to sound stern, but he couldn’t help smiling. Because it was a shit name, but it was them. They were at least going to make a go of it. “Let’s run through Fool’s Gold again and then you can paint in your, y’know. Forest monsters, whatever you want to do with that.”

Harry frowned over at him but said nothing, and they eased into the song - one of their newer ones, the harmonies still tenuous and sloppy. The rest of the day fell away around them.

As he put his guitar away in its case and shook out his stiff wrists, Niall took a sneaky look at the finishing details Harry’d put on the painting. It was still simple, still mostly blocks of browns and greens. Harry wasn’t one for detail work - he was constantly getting shit for it in critiques. But it was undeniably Niall, the straight line of his nose in profile and the way his shoulders turned in over the body of the guitar. The back of his hair was dappled in copper and gold, like he was being viewed from beneath a lattice of summer foliage. All around him were the vague shapes of distant trees, the Goyen colors that made the painting look very old, or at least, made it look like it was a painting of something very old.

And there, in the background, interspersed between the blunt trunks of the trees… Niall would’ve missed it, if he hadn’t been looking for it, or something like it. It was a caravan of horses, so small and indistinct that Niall forgot he was trying to be discreet and bent close to the page, reaching for the pocket of his shirt where his glasses were.

He stared at the spot until it blurred out in front of him, until the horses were smeary brushstrokes and their riders were smudges topped with fingerprint heads. It was anachronistic - if it was any less faint it’d unsettle the entire portrait.

Harry cleared his throat behind him, making Niall startle. His glasses were askew, and he reached up to fix them with his free hand.

“Hold me tight and fear me not,” Harry said, slowly. “I liked it. So.” He traced the line of horses with his fingernail. “Only, like… I dunno if you’re Tam Lin, I guess.”

Niall pushed his glasses up off his face. They would be smeary with sweat from his hair later. “Oh?”

“I just. Like, you’re not. I dunno, mate, really, just think you’re more the type to drag somebody down off their horse and hang onto ‘em.” Harry paused. “Tam Lin’s a bit of a knob anyway, you ask me.”

Niall opened his mouth to respond and then closed it again, because, well alright then. He could feel himself going faintly pink around the edges.

“Well,” he said, finally. He stooped to pick his guitar case up by the handle. “Be seeing you. Come round to the store tomorrow night if you’re free, we’ll fix up that other song.”

Harry nodded. He was peeling the painters tape away from the edges of the paper with his thumbnail. “Yeah, should be able to do that. Get home safe.”

And it was that strange vulnerability - seeing his own sharp face drawn in Harry’s imprecise hand, and the lingering strangeness beyond him - which actually got Niall serious about writing his own lyrics. Harry shouldn’t be allowed to see so many layers of him, he thought. He’d be better off drawing them out of himself.

-

It was a five-song set, practically nothing, at the cafe on Harry’s campus. Bressie and Eoghan had conned the campus engagement fund out of two hundred dollars for piss-poor lager and they were paying the bands in “publicity” (Eoghan’s words) and “I’ll owe you a favor, mate,” (Bressie’s, even though Niall’d been ready to beg to get on the bill). Niall and Harry had played a few open mics around downtown, but never any place where people they knew would see them.

“Alright, Niall?” Harry asked him, in the narrow minute before they were due out on stage.

Niall felt a bit green, truth be told.

“Yeah, Haz. We’ll smash it.”

And, against the odds, they did. Harry’s easygoing charisma sunk down into the audience from the first. They opened with Niall’s arrangement of Tam Lin, for Halloween, and Harry’d glanced over at him and joked that Niall was available after the show if anyone wanted to hold him tight and fear him not, making him go pink all over his cheeks and neck.

“Fuck off,” he’d said good-naturedly, and launched into their next song, a new one Harry’d brought him called “Sweet Creature.” It was simple enough to play, but the harmony Niall sang over Harry on the chorus always made him feel light-headed, over-oxygenated, like he was inhaling a watermelon trying to access those high notes in his falsetto.

They carried on with two of Niall’s songs from before he’d started writing with Harry, which were upbeat and forgettable, and closed with “Fool’s Gold.” Niall was finally feeling like they’d nailed the vocal arrangement, and he crowded up close to Harry at the front of the stage to really listen to his notes, to get their harmonies perfectly in tune. Harry’d actually thought it was risky, closing their set with something so gentle after trying to build the audience up.

“Won’t we lose momentum? Should stick it in after ‘sweet creature,’ you ask me,” he’d said. They’d been sharing a joint on the floor of his studio, a brown paper bag of apples between them. They’d been trying to work out a five-song setlist for longer than five songs would actually take to play.

And Niall had felt compelled to protest because Harry had a point, what he was saying wasn’t untrue, but he also wasn’t right. “Should close with one of ours, though. And this is our best one.”

“What about ‘on my own?’” Harry pointed to it on the scrap of paper, wedged into the middle of the setlist. “Great show-closer, very energetic, not even a cover.”

“I said one of ours, Haz, I’ve had this one since before I met you. That’s not the same.”

And he’d watched Harry cut his eyes away, a small, pleased smile on his face. He hoped Harry understood.

They needn’t have worried, though - the audience was with them, singing along to the second chorus, rapt even though it was barely half seven and the café was crowded and noisy. Niall and Harry tumbled offstage together, giddily clutching each other’s arms.

“That was - “ Harry started, bright-eyed, peering down into Niall’s face.

“Wow!” Niall said stupidly. He felt dizzy with it. With a five-song set at a coffee house showcase for a bunch of posturing art students. But still.

“I’d say,” said a voice from behind them. “You’ve got some great chemistry up there.”

The man wasn’t an art student, that’s for sure. He also wasn’t Irish.

Harry stuck out his hand. “Thanks!” he said, grinning. “You the bloke from the campus engagement office?”

The man laughed. “No, no, I’m… I was just stopping in for a coffee. I caught the last of your set. Did you write those songs?”

“Yeah,” Niall said. “Well, we didn’t write Tam Lin, obviously, but. It’s my arrangement.”

The man nodded. “My name is Simon Cowell, I’m a talent acquisition specialist with Fetch Records.” As he spoke, he pulled a business card from his billfold and passed it to Harry. “The label’s publishing arm is looking to hire a some in-house songwriters, and I was wondering if the two of you would like to come to London next week for a meeting.”

In decades to come, Niall would examine this moment for narrative foreshadowing. He would unwind the dialogue and find nothing, no peek into the monumental success or the immense sacrifices to come. It didn’t fit neatly into the Navigator story, so he never discussed it.

“We, um,” he started, looking at Simon’s business card, pinched between Harry’s forefinger and thumb. “We’ll have to talk it over, but - “

“We’ll call you,” Harry finished for him. “Once we’ve decided. Before the weekend.”

“I hope you do,” Simon said, and then he was moving back through the crowd, shrugging on his coat, and then he was gone.

“Who was that then?” Eoghan said, coming up behind them and slinging an arm over Niall’s shoulders. “Your dad?” He nodded at Harry.

“No,” Harry said slowly. He turned the business card over in his hand. It was blank on the other side. It was a heavy, expensive linen paper. “I… I don’t know, yet.”

And then Bressie was there beside them, congratulating them and pressing bottles of beer into both their hands, and the rest of the night melted away around them.

-

“We should just call him,” Harry said. He was laying on the concrete floor of the studio beside Niall, with Simon’s business card held aloft above them in his right hand. “We could ask some questions.”

“We could go to the meeting and ask some questions,” Niall pointed out. Harry had been having a call-or-not-call dialogue with himself for the last three days, and Niall had made up his mind to stay neutral, to do whatever Harry landed on. He wasn’t so interested in a career as a songwriter, really, but it would be a good jumping off point for the band. It would be a way to meet people, at least. But it wasn’t the only way, and he knew that, and Harry was… Conflicted. So.

“I’m not going all the way to London only to find out it’s some crap deal he’s offering,” Harry said. “Besides, I’m meant to be using reading week to catch up on my work.”

“Thought traditionally you were meant to be using reading week to get blitzed,” Niall said, and felt Harry do some sort of half-shrug, half-chuckle beside him.

“Well. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Niall looked at the card in Harry’s hand. “I don’t… I’m fine to do whatever you want to do, you know. But like, what’s holding you back, Haz?” He turned his head so he could see Harry, the way the lamp by the easel traced his profile in dull gold. “You don’t want to just see?”

Harry blinked slowly, then shook his head. “It’s not… It isn’t that simple, I guess. I didn’t want to like, do music that way until I met you, you know?”

Niall felt himself flush. He hated how obvious his face made things, sometimes.

“And if we go to this meeting and they want to hire us as songwriters, even if we’re still writing together, it won’t be the same, will it?” Harry continued. “I mean, we won’t be Harry and Niall, we’ll be a couple of credits on the back of a gatefold.” He licked his lips. “We won’t be writing songs we’d want to play together.” He paused for a long moment. “We wouldn’t be a band.”

Niall wanted to point out that two boys didn’t really make a band, anyway, but that felt like a lie so he didn’t.

“So let’s not go,” he said. “If you don’t want to go, let’s not go. We can call him in the morning.”

“But Niall,” Harry said, drawing Niall’s name out in a whine. “What if this is our shot?”

Niall shrugged. “Our shot at something you don’t want to do, maybe. But like… What’s the point, then? There’s other ways to get a record deal.”

Harry turned onto his side. Niall could feel his eyes on him, his breath on the side of his face. Harry, at the best of times, didn’t have the best grasp of the concept of personal space. They were working on it.

“Okay,” Harry said finally. “I’ll call him in the morning, okay?”

Niall nodded. “Yeah, Haz.”

And then it was over and done with, Harry telling Niall about the perfunctory phone conversation over lunch the next day. Niall responded with some potential gigs he was working on booking them, and they spent a large portion of the afternoon splayed out together in a nearby park, working on setlists and enjoying the rare warmth of late autumn.

Niall almost forgot about their brief potential future as songwriters - had genuinely put it out of his mind to focus on things like booking gigs and writing with Harry and making plans for the both of them to spend the Christmas holidays with his family. It wasn’t until mid-December that he was forced to think about it again.

They’d had a set at the Cobblestone, so early in the evening that the audience was mostly the club’s staff and every art school friend Harry could con into attendance, but the club’s booker had given them his card afterwards.

“If you’re ever in need, we’re always looking for local acts to promote,” he’d said warmly. “Beautiful songs, boys, really something else.”

It wasn’t much but Niall had been riding that high, sliding a pint glass back and forth between his hands on the bar while the next band set up. Harry was on the other side of the bar, leaning his elbow in a patch of something sticky, flirting with a girl from one of his painting courses who’d turned up because he’d asked her.

Niall was chewing over the weird, jealous feeling that stuck in his teeth. He’d put up fliers at the record shop, and had seen a couple of the regulars pass by, but he had the keen feeling they would’ve been around anyway. There was nobody really there to see him.

Across the bar, Harry put his hand on the girl’s arm and she leaned into his touch, brushing her hair back behind her ear. She was being very obvious, Niall thought. She looked stupid. They both looked stupid. He drained the rest of his pint and began to look around for a payphone, in case he’d need to call a cab.

“Oh!” said somebody behind him. “Hello again!”

Niall twisted stupidly around trying to locate the source of the voice, which he wasn’t - truth be told - entirely sure was directed at him, and there, standing just to his right at the bar, was the man from Fetch Records. S… Something that started with S. Niall blinked hard, suddenly feeling drunker than he wanted to be, trying to clear his head.

“Hi,” he said. “Mr., um…”

“Cowell, but call me Simon,” Simon said easily, shaking Niall’s hand. “What are you drinking? On me.” He signalled to the bartender, who materialized with two more pints, and rifled through a fold of bills before tossing one onto the bartop.

“So are you here to see The Nightimers?” Niall asked. He didn’t want to seem rude.

Simon tilted his head noncommittally. “I’m here to see whoever’s worth seeing.”

“Oh.”

And Niall could turn on the charm, if he had to. He should, he thought - this was an A&R man from Fetch, a person who could open real doors for him and Harry if he played his cards right. And yet, he’d only been interested in them as songwriters before, and Harry had seemed uncomfortable with him from the first, and Niall was in a strange, sour mood anyway.

“Listen, Niall, I’d like to be frank with you for a moment, if that’s alright,” Simon said. He took a long pull from the pint in front of him. He seemed more a scotch and soda type to Niall. “May I speak plainly?”

Niall nodded. He wished, vaguely, that Harry was with him.

“I still think you’d be a great addition to our publishing company,” Simon said, and Niall opened his mouth to politely decline whatever offer Simon was going to make him, but Simon held up a hand to stop him. “I know Harry’s not interested in songwriting as a career, and honestly, he’s right. You don’t waste that kind of star power writing hits for other people.”

Niall busied himself with the beer in front of him, waiting for Simon to circle around to whatever point he was trying to make.

“I’ve a friend at Camden recording studios who has agreed to engineer a single for the two of you. I’d like something to bring along when I pitch you to my colleagues at Fetch. We’re expanding.” Simon held Niall’s gaze and lifted the beer to his mouth. He took a long drink. “I’m hoping to pitch several promising folk acts this year, starting with you. What do you say?”

“Well, I…” Niall searched for Harry on the other side of the bar but he’d gone off somewhere - the girl he was talking to had vanished as well. Good for Harry. “I can’t make any commitments without talking to Harry.”

Simon gave him that same, vague head tilt. “I suppose I expected that,” he said. “Do you still have my number, or did you burn my card after last time?”

Harry had been ready to throw the card away, Niall remembered. What had he said? This is a promise for someone else’s dream. Niall had even let him toss it into the wastepaper basket at his studio, but then… Niall had fished it out from the crumpled, paint-smeared papers in the bin and had tucked it into the back of his notebook, just in case.

“I still have it,” he said, shortly. “Listen, I’ll call you. I don’t know if we can get in touch before the holidays, but I’ll call you.”

Simon nodded slowly. “Alright.” He downed the rest of his pint and shook Niall’s hand again. “I’ll speak to you soon, Niall.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Niall?” Simon said. He was already angled towards the door. So much for seeing the Nightimers. “When you cut the single. I think that new one, Through the Dark, is your best bet at an A-side.”

And then he was gone, and Niall was alone at the bar. He waited a few minutes, and when Harry didn’t return, he gathered his guitar case and caught a cab back home. Outside the car’s window, Dublin slumbered fitfully, and inside, Niall let his thoughts wander to Simon’s business card, to Camden studios, to possible B-sides. To Harry.

He meant to bring it up right away, but Harry’d had his final exams and they’d just kept missing each other, and then they were on the train back to Mullingar and it didn’t seem like he could put it off any further. Niall wasn’t deliberately trying to ambush Harry where he couldn’t escape, but. Well. It’d worked out nicely, that way, hadn’t it?

“Look, d’you remember our gig at the Cobblestone.”

“Yeah,” Harry said dreamily. Across the train compartment, he leaned his head on the window. “Been after Susie for weeks, would’ve invited her out to a gig sooner if I’d known she had such a thing for singers.”

God, he’s an idiot, Niall thought, because everyone had a thing for singers.

“Right,” he said shortly. “Well after you left I sort of, um -”

Harry turned to leer at him. “After I left? Who’d you go home with? Why are you only gracing me with the details now? I probably know all those girls.”

“I mean -” Niall said, immediately uncomfortable. “D’you remember that bloke -” and he rushed on, seeing Harry’s eyebrows shoot up - “from Fetch Records who came to the Halloween showcase?”

Harry’s interest settled back down to a manageable level. “Yeah, why?”

“Well he was there. Bought me a drink, said he wants us to cut a seven-inch at Camden in January so he can try to sign us.”

Niall watched Harry’s face. This was an event he’d expected to be greeted with some kind of - he didn’t really know - celebration? Jumping up and down, possibly hugging? It wasn’t a record deal yet but it was progress, in the direction they wanted to go.

“Good! That’s great,” Harry said finally, and his smile looked real, if tired.

“Are you sure? Look, I know you’re keen on school and we’ll work around it -”

“No, no, it’s good, I’ll make it work,” Harry said. He leaned across the train compartment and put his hand on Niall’s knee. “Just… Doesn’t Simon seem, I don’t know, a little sleazy to you?”

Niall considered it. “I mean, yeah, but he’s an A&R rep for a major label so. Bound to be a bit of a sleaze, all things considered. Rather he be a sleaze who likes our songs, I guess.”

Harry tilted his head in thought. “Yeah, yeah you’re probably right.” And then he slid down off his seat, into the space between them, to kneel on the floor with his stomach pressed to Niall’s knees. It was bizarre and intimate, and Niall felt his neck and ears going pink.

“Come here, then,” Harry said, and held his arms out for a hug.

Niall’s dad actually threatened to cry when they told him, tentatively, about their recording plans. He insisted they call Simon to set up the meeting right then, although it was well after office hours and nobody was around to pick up, and then pressed the phone at Harry, telling him he should call his mother and let her know.

“Hullo Anne!” Niall yelled over Harry’s shoulder into the phone receiver. “Thanks for Harry, he’s very, extremely good!”

Harry tried to look annoyed, swatted him, ended up grinning anyway so his dimples stood out. “You’re a menace, go away!”

And Niall did, because he guessed it might be a private moment, after all.

All things considered, Christmas was more of a quiet night in. Greg and Denise came down for dinner, and Harry attached himself to Denise immediately, asking about a thousand questions about the unignorable baby bump under her jumper. They watched the last two thirds It’s a Wonderful Life when it came on the telly, Bobby falling asleep in his armchair around the time Donna Reed started showing Jimmy Stewart around their broken-down house.

Greg and Denise gathered their things and left a little later, promising to come back down to see Bobby at least one more time before the baby was born, and after waving their car out of sight from the driveway, Bobby headed up to bed.

“Don’t stay up too late, boys,” he told Niall and Harry, laughing.

Around them the house was quiet and chilly. It was strange, to have Harry here. To have anyone here. To be here himself. As much as he loved Mullingar, its strange cobbled roads and the way the sky hung split-open over the town, he didn’t venture back so terribly often anymore.

“And then there were two,” Harry said, beside him.

“Thanks for coming down,” Niall said. “It was nice having you here. My da’s been after me to get you to visit, put a face to the name and all.”

“You talk about me to your dad?” Harry was grinning, smug and insufferable.

“I talk about the band to my da’, ‘snot my fault you’re in it.”

Harry threw back his head and laughed. “It’s exactly you’re fault I’m in it, Niall, you asked me to be in it!”

“Well. Worked out alright so far, didn’t it?” Niall wondered when he would stop feeling like he was testing the water with Harry, when he’d start feeling sure that Harry wanted to see where this music would take them as much as he did. “With the recording, like.”

Harry pressed his lips together in a thin seam. Niall knew he was staring, knew he had the most obvious face.

“It’s going to,” Harry said finally. “With you? C’mon, how could it not.”

This sort of enigmatic statement was so typical of Harry and so impossible to parse. It drove Niall half-crazy. When he drilled right down to the root of it, he was absolutely sure he’d never go anywhere he wanted to without Harry. His lyrics were better. His voice was more versatile. And Niall wasn’t being self-pitying, he knew he was a good arranger, a great guitar-player, had a certain way of putting Harry’s words to a melody that came perfectly naturally and which would be lost if Harry wanted to continue alone, or collaborate with someone else. But the fact remained that Harry had it, whatever it was. That thing that made people want to come out and see him, and hear him sing.

“I guess so,” Niall said, trying to keep his voice light, trying to tamp down the flood of uncertainty that Harry was so frustratingly able to uncork in him.

“Listen, I’ve gotten you something for Christmas,” Harry said, and got up swiftly and left the room, leaving Niall alone on the sofa still feeling oddly exposed.

He’d gotten Harry something, too - a couple of Joni Mitchell records he thought he’d like, that had come through the record store in October and which he’d set aside until now. But he was always giving Harry new music - it was part of their collaboration, their mutual bettering of one another by their disparate influences. He hadn’t even wrapped the records, they were just stuck in his bag with a couple other things he’d brought to play his dad while he was home.

When Harry reappeared he was holding a parcel wrapped in red and gold paper, and he held it out to Niall with a grin.

“Happy Christmas,” he said, and Niall smiled unsurely back at him, leaning up to take the package.

“Should I open it now?”

Harry rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t have to be, like, a big production or anything. It’s just something small, made me think of you.”

“Alright then.” Niall slit the sellotape with his thumbnail and peeled back the wrapping. Inside was a nondescript box. When he lifted the lid, there were two things nestled side by side: a glass bottleneck slide, and a beautiful capo, delicately made, with his initials monogrammed onto the side.

Harry was watching him carefully, still smiling. “Alright, then?”

“Harry, you shouldn’t have,” Niall said honestly. They were lovely, and things he needed but never wanted to indulge in. He had a capo, which was at this point largely held together with an elastic band but functioned just fine, and he’d forgone a slide of his own because that sort of music didn’t sell particularly well, and he wasn’t writing much of it for him and Harry, so it had seemed too frivolous to buy for himself. “I love them, really, but you shouldn’t have.”

Harry shrugged. “I can take them back if you’d rather -”

“No, no,” Niall said, laughing and waving his hand. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

The smug look on Harry’s face was almost enough to make Niall want to force the capo back into his hands. But it was so beautiful, and practical, and it was something Harry must’ve had to plan, and…

“Well, we should play something.”

Niall was very aware of how hard he was trying, constantly, to stay as interesting as possible for Harry, at least musically speaking. It was, frankly, humiliating. He knew they were friends - knew it not only by the fact that Harry was here, in Mullingar, and by the beautiful and entirely suited gift he’d given him, but by the countless, endless conversations they’d had over the last year. The primarily comfortable times they’d sat quietly together in Harry’s studio, Harry sketching him over and over again. The way it felt when they wrote music together.

“Go on, then,” Harry said unsurely, nodding at Niall’s guitar case.

It felt less spontaneous when Niall had to unpack his guitar and tune it, settle the capo over the fingerboard. It really was a marvelous piece of work. Made the rest of his guitar look like crap, honestly.

“You’ll have to sing most of it,” he said, because the chord shapes were all knuckle-breakers and he had to concentrate or he’d lose the motion of the thing. Already he could feel the rolling melody getting away from him, and he struggled to reign it in. But he knew Harry would know the song. He finished the intro and nodded to Harry to start.

“Well it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe,” Harry sang uncertainly. “Niall, your dad’s asleep.”

Niall attempted a shrug. “He’s alright,” he said. He nodded to Harry, to indicate he should pick it back up.

Harry raised an eyebrow at him but settled back anyway, breathing in deep so he could come back in at the pre-chorus. “When your rooster crows at the break of dawn,” he sang, and Niall joined in because he could. “Look out your window and I’ll be gone. You’re the reason I’m traveling on, but don’t think twice, it’s alright.”

The next morning they huddled together with both their heads tilted awkwardly over the telephone’s receiver and called Simon again. He wasn’t in, but his secretary was, and Niall nervously asked her to pass along a message to him: they wanted to record, and they were happy to travel to London to meet with him, if he wanted. A few phone numbers for where they could be reached: Niall’s flat; the record store; the phone in Harry’s studio building. That they were grateful for the opportunity.

“You feel good?” Harry asked him, resting a hand on Niall’s shoulder.

“Think so,” Niall said. He leaned back in the desk chair so that the back of his head rested against Harry’s stomach. “Glad to have it, y’know, out of our court.”

They’d planned to get a train back to Dublin that afternoon, but Harry had some paintings he wanted to work on, and it was a mild sort of after-Christmas morning - a little damp, but not prohibitively cold for working outside.

“Plein air,” Harry said, and he had the voice on that told Niall he thought he was being very cultured and clever. “Nothing like it, mate.”

“Don’t see why I have to come,” Niall groused.

“Not got any other friends in Mullingar, have I?” Harry said, grinning. In the chilly mid-morning air he’d turned an appealing shade of pink. “Bressie’s not home for the holidays, you’re all I’ve got.”

Walking beside him, Niall swayed so that his shoulder tapped against Harry’s arm. “I’m always all you’ve got,” he said. “If your portfolio is anything to go by.”

Harry shrugged. “Yeah, well. Why’d I bother learning a new face, right?”

Which was fair, Niall guessed.

A ways from Niall’s father’s house, Harry set up his palette of paints and opened a jam jar of water and set about painting the forest. Niall had brought a book and he sprawled out in the grass with it, let the loamy scent of Irish soil overwhelm him. It wasn’t as though he wasn’t at home in Dublin - he’d been there long enough, he supposed - but there was nowhere quite like Mullingar.

The weak winter sun drifted over them. Harry painted the distant tree line, then the spindly fence around a cow pasture, then a few loose gesture sketches of Niall reading. The way Harry got when he painted like this - tongue between his teeth, brows drawn together so that a dark crease formed just over his nose - was something Niall was forever trying to bring out of him when they wrote music together. It was an intensity he was both inspired by and shamefully, profoundly jealous of.

He wanted badly to ask Harry what kind of future he saw for himself after art school. If he might go into advertising, or try to show his vague watercolors of Niall playing guitar in a gallery somewhere, or any of the other things people who went to art school supposedly did with their lives. He had been so sure for so long of his own path - guitar player, songwriter, performer - that to suddenly account for another passenger on his endless march forward was discomfiting, to say the least.

He swallowed down the urge to speak. Harry would be thinking about these things on his own. He wasn’t stupid. He’d let Niall know, if there was anything to know.

They took a longer route back to the house, Niall showing Harry around the pastures and fields of his childhood, and when they got back and started packing, Harry unstuck a newsprint-wrapped package from his backpack and hefted it under his arm. He brought it downstairs to Bobby.

Because he was terminally nosy, Niall had followed him just far enough to watch him from the landing, through the slats in the bannister.

“I brought you something to say thanks for having me here,” Harry said in his slow, deep voice. “Didn’t want it to be, like, here’s a present because I made it, and all, so it’s not really… I just thought, you might like it?”

It was one of the most clumsy conversations Niall had ever witnessed, if he was being honest with himself, but it was charming, Harry’s nervousness.

“Can I?” Bobby said genially, taking the package from Harry.

From his perch, Niall could just make out the peaty browns and greens of the painting Harry’d done of him months ago, when the last vestiges of summer were still frothing in the air and they’d still been working on Tam Lin. Harry had gotten mediocre marks on it, but Niall knew how proud he was of it, how satisfied he still was with the composition. He was unexpectedly touched.

“Harry, that’s lovely,” Bobby said. He brought the painting over to the window to admire it in natural light. “You’ve got him just right.”

Niall could just see the curve of Harry’s cheek beyond the rumpled fall of his hair, but he recognized the way it dimpled, soft and pleased.

All too soon they were back on the train to Dublin, both overburdened with new wool socks and butcher-papered parcels of cured meats and the kind of bone-deep ache that comes from too little time at home.

Later, Niall would remember this moment as one of the last truly uncomplicated ones. Before the band, such as it was, took off; before Navigator; before Harry had to choose between school and whatever bright, impossible thing Niall was trying to offer him. It was the two of them and the verdant landscape of Ireland rushing past the window. It was Niall and Harry, an improbable pair of best friends. It made Niall warm and soft in the moment, realizing the bounty of all they had between them.

“When do classes start back up for you?” he asked Harry. He had a rough idea, enough friends at Harry’s school to hazard a guess at the general structure of the academic calendar, but still. It was important, sometimes, to be precise.

“Two weeks from Monday,” Harry said. “Did you want to try to get into the studio before then, maybe?”

“If we can, might make it easier on us in the long run,” Niall said. “We’ll see what Simon has in mind, I guess.”

“Right,” Harry said. He leaned his head against the window. Niall watched the seam where Harry’s reflection joined to the side of his cheek, pressed to the glass.

“Did you have any ideas about what songs you’d like to do?” he asked. He’d tried to put thought into it but ultimately he trusted Harry’s judgment above his own. It was a perilous thing to admit to himself.

“Yeah, actually,” Harry said. He shifted, animating just a little. They were both bone-tired, wrung out from holiday fervor. “I liked Through the Dark for the A-side, and then…” Harry tilted his head and looked carefully at Niall. “I know you thought Sweet Creature would do well for the B, but I actually… I’ve been working on something new, if we could get it into shape in time.” He shifted so that he could catch Niall’s gaze. The moment went liquid. “I think it’s a keeper.”

Niall swallowed. “D’you have it here? Can I have a look?”

Harry rummaged through his bag and, after a moment of searching, located the lyrics he’d been working on in a notebook he passed over to Niall. His handwriting was familiar to Niall at this point, all imprecise capitals and rounded corners. Neat without being neat.

He read the lyrics.

Harry was right. It was a keeper.

-

The heat never functioned quite right in Niall’s apartment, and even though he kept it neat enough - he didn’t have many things, after all - it always looked a little dingy, just from the way the paint was peeling. The water stain on the ceiling. The grit that he could never completely scrape out from the cracks between the floorboards. Harry turned on a lamp and went over to Niall’s time-softened cardboard box of records, flipping through all of them before putting one on.

“This is nice,” he said, standing again. Niall didn’t know quite what to say. That he and Harry had been writing music together for months - that Harry had come back to Mullingar with him for the holidays - and he’d never been to Niall’s apartment. They were always meeting at Harry’s studio, or his dorm room, or the campus cafe. The record store where Niall worked on the weekends.

The kitchen wasn’t much more than a corner of the apartment where there was tile instead of hardwood, and the awkward protrusion of a counter bracketing it off from the rest of the main room, but they both squeezed into it and busied themselves with tea. Harry filled the kettle and opened all the cupboards looking for mugs before Niall handed him his only two from the draining board. Niall bent to get a half-bottle of whiskey from a bottom drawer and passed it up to Harry. It was so cold inside that he wanted to put on another jumper. In the living room, the record Harry’d put on crackled.

“I love this one,” Niall said absently, humming along to ‘Safe in My Garden.’

“Me too,” Harry replied. He was adjusting the burner under the kettle, fidgety, impatient. “D’you think I could sing like her if I tried?”

“Oh, sure,” Niall said. “You’re, y’know… Old Hollywood enough, I think.”

Harry turned away, looking pleased. Niall didn’t know why it was so easy for Harry to have these conversations: to want to sing like a woman, and not feel self conscious about it; to ask Niall for validation without seeming needy. Why Niall couldn’t do these things, in turn.

Presently the kettle began to sound its steam-engine whistle, and Harry poked two tea bags into the mugs and covered them in water. Niall added a splash of whiskey into each.

“Cheers,” he said. The clock on the wall ticked down the last seconds until midnight.

It was 1971. If the sixties hadn’t been dead before, they must be, now.

He and Harry sat side by side on his bed, in the absence of a sofa or any other real furniture. The tea and the whiskey warmed Niall enough that he could feel his cheeks and the tips of his ears going pink. Beside him, Harry looked loose and inviting. The rumpled collar of his shirt was tucked half inside the neck of his jumper, and Niall reached over without thinking to straighten it for him. Harry smiled, eyes closed.

“Niall,” he said, after a long moment. There was another song starting up, its choppy jazz standard chords making Niall’s heart go funny and tender. “Come here.”

And because he didn’t have any reason not to, Niall scooted closer, and watched robotically as Harry put an arm around his waist and pulled him clumsily so they were standing, nearly chest to chest.

“Can’t hear this song and not want to dance,” Harry said. His arm tightened around Niall’s waist and his other hand found Niall’s and held it, loosely. They swayed together. Niall could barely breathe.

This was the thing about Harry he’d been refusing to confront for months. The fact that he’d never had a friend in quite this way before, had never been made to feel so vulnerable with any of the lads back home. How Harry was pliant and physical with him, and how it made certain things about himself he’d thought best left buried come alive. It was unignorable now, with the way Harry was draped over him, his cheek pressed to Niall’s shoulder.

There was some part of himself - how significant, he wasn’t sure - that was attracted to Harry. Not curious, not unsure - the sort of bone-deep certain attraction that had him imagining what it would be like to tilt his head up and kiss him on the mouth.

And then Harry was singing, gently, muffled where his mouth was half-pressed against Niall’s jumper.

“While I’m alone and blue as can be, dream a little dream of me…”

He did sound lovely. He could sing like Cass, if he wanted to; he could make it sound like it was thirty years ago, and like he was hearing this song for the very first time. His voice was warm and gentle, and Niall could feel the warmth of his breath on his neck.

“We could cover this one, if you like,” he said, awkwardly. “Or California Dreamin’, even.”

Harry shook his head against Niall’s shoulder. In the air around them, Mama Cass crooned.

“Not yet,” Harry said. “Maybe someday when we’re, y’know, feeling middle-aged and nostalgic for the sixties and all.” He pulled back far enough to grin at Niall. “When we’re reminiscing about the good life we had drinking shit whiskey in your freezing apartment and listening to the Mamas and the Papas, we can put out a seven-inch with a couple covers, right? For now, we should - “ and he sang again, out-of-key against the song, which was already winding down - “Maaaake our own kind of music…”

That made Niall laugh, punctured the tense bubble of emotion in his chest. He could be attracted to Harry and never do anything about it, he supposed. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that intimacy was a flexible concept: there were people you slept with, and people you were friends with, and an entire infinite grey area between. He was grateful for what he had with Harry, for the ways it allowed some of his secrets to pour out in metaphor. For the way Harry demanded no explanations from him; the undefined swathes of Harry’s own life he was allowed to see in verse.

Niall stepped backward, just out of Harry’s arms, and they smiled giddily at one another for a moment. Niall barely registered the next song starting up, content to peer into Harry’s face. He sipped his tea and felt himself grow warm. It wasn’t until the needle of the record player skated into the runoff groove that he moved entirely away from Harry, bending to sort through his records and pick something else. Something less charged. He unearthed a bruised copy of Astral Weeks and put it on, and he and Harry migrated to the floor, where it was colder, yes, but there was more room to laze about.

“Haz?” Niall asked. He was content enough to talk over Van Morrison - he was the wrong type of Irish, even if he had a beautiful voice.

“Yeah, Niall,” Harry said. He was splayed out across the floorboards. He took up an impossible amount of space.

“Happy New Year,” Niall said, and he lay down beside Harry, close but not touching. He held himself very still.

One of Harry’s big hands began to starfish its way around the floor, moving towards Niall until it could grab some part of him - his elbow - and hang onto it for a moment.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “Happy New Year.”

-

Writing the record more or less took over. They’d cut two tracks in a long session at Camden and within the week Simon had called and had given them a patchwork of studio time to make an album. They had material, sure, but with the promise of two sides of an LP full of just their music, Niall’s penchant for perfectionism had taken over. He was spending every evening at Harry’s studio. Harry was over at his flat for marathon songwriting sessions on the weekends. They were cobbling together something that Niall hoped could immortalize them, crystalize them just as they were, in this magical winter.

He kicked the snow off his boots before trudging up the stairs to Harry’s studio. It was a Wednesday evening, and Harry’d called Niall at the record store, excited, and asked him to stop by after work. They hadn’t had anything planned - Niall had actually been sort of looking forward to going home and getting to some of the washing up, which he had become disturbingly lax about after the record deal had come through. But Harry had sounded giddy and reckless, which were his two favorite moods on Harry, so he’d driven over even though the weather was more or less untenable, and here he was, pushing the studio door open.

Harry was at his easel, his long hair pinned up on top of his head, a paintbrush held between his teeth as he blotted paint off whatever he was working on with a flannel. 

“You’re here!” Harry said, but it came out garbled around the brush, and he laughed and motioned Niall over to look.

The piece on the easel was probably the most bluntly realistic thing Niall had ever seen Harry paint. He stared at it. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from it.

“Thought it might do, y’know, for the album cover,” Harry said. “Dunno if Fetch’s got an in-house artist or anything but. Might pitch it, anyway.”

“Haz…” Niall said.

The painting was of the two of them. Its realism was striking, given the fact that Harry almost always worked from a reference, and was usually much more impressionistic than what he’d painted here. It showed them from the shoulders up, with their backs to one another. He had painted them in gouache, dozens of delicate layers of color, blues and greys. There was the familiar tumble of Harry’s curls over his shoulders, and the sharp angles of Niall’s brow bone and nose. They were lit softly, so that their shadows on whatever surface Harry had painted behind them - flat and grey - were indistinct. It made them - Harry especially - look otherworldly. They were exactly and realistically themselves, but Harry had imbued them with some essence of the aos sí, some preternatural quality Niall couldn’t quite place.

It was really a remarkable piece. It’d be a stunner of an album cover.

“Harry, it’s incredible,” Niall said finally. He let his eyes drink their fill. “We don’t even have a title yet, how’d you even come up with this? How’d you have the time to do this?”

Harry shrugged. He was so modest. Niall watched the pleased flush creep down Harry’s neck as he tried not to bask in Niall’s obvious amazement.

“Wasn’t hard,” Harry said finally. “I mean, I’ve got a mirror, don’t I? And you, I mean, I’ve drawn. What. Two hundred pictures of you? Could paint you in my sleep, I s’pose.”

Two hundred, Christ. Niall felt vaguely guilty, embarrassed at how much time Harry’d had to spend studying him, for lack of other friends. For lack of anything else to do, he shoved Harry’s shoulder, grinning. “Fuck off, Styles, it takes a talented hand to capture this luminous beauty.”

But Harry just grinned at him. “Talented hand, yeah? I’ll take it.”

They took a long moment, looking between the painting and one another, both smiling stupidly. It looked like an album cover. It was confrontational, and it was the two of them. There was something strange and evocative even about their half-expressions, the way Harry had painted them each in profile. Niall noted the strange, wistful downturn of his own lips in the painting, and the way Harry had painted himself almost wide-eyed, overwhelmed. It was absolutely representative not only of the two of them, but of the songs they’d written. The ones they wanted to include on the record. The feelings they were trying to evoke.

“It’s really perfect, Haz,” Niall said eventually, because it was a well-earned compliment, and it was absolutely true. “We just need an album title.”

“I’d actually been thinking about that,” Harry said, turning on his stool to face Niall properly. “I’ve a bit of a list going but I think… I dunno, I think there’s one you might like.” 

He reached to the stack of papers, test blots of color and sketches and studies in perspective and draughtsmanship, rifling through them until he found what he wanted. It was a sheet of thin onion-skin paper, entirely translucent. Harry had written on it in opaque, white ink - the letters sloped to the right, a march of squarish capitals. He laid the paper over the painting so that the letting showed through:

HARRY & NIALL

GREEN AS ANY GLASS

“Oh,” Niall said, and then more softly, “Oh. Did you want… I mean, I didn’t think we’d put Tam Lin on, though.”

Harry was adjusting the paper, centering the letters over the painting. He tore off a little hunk of painter’s tape and secured it all in place before turning to look at Niall again. “I didn’t think we would, either, just… Sounds right, doesn’t it? Sorta matches the mood of the record.” Harry smiled. “You don’t have to give everyone who buys your record a blueprint of every feeling that goes on it. You and me know where the title comes from, yeah?”

Niall wanted, suddenly, to have a guitar in his hands. He wanted to be writing with Harry, right now, scrapping at least two of the songs which didn’t deserve this perfect album cover. He wanted the absolute right sequence of songs and the perfect vocal arrangements. He wanted to justify the fact that Harry, against all odds, was still here choosing to work with him, choosing to create such a wealth of art with him, for him. Niall wanted to throw himself at Harry’s feet.

“Thanks, mate,” he said, clapping Harry on the shoulder. “We’ll pitch it to Simon when we see him next week, if it’s okay by you.”

Harry smiled at him again, smaller, more contained.

“Thanks for coming to see it. I just - I finished it, and I didn’t want to keep it to myself anymore.” He paused. “Even if we don’t end up using it, for whatever reason. I just wanted to do it.”

“You’re too good to me, Haz,” Niall said, trying to sound like he didn’t mean it and failing miserably. “I’ve got to get home - come round to mine tomorrow night and we can get some work done?”

“Sounds good, man,” Harry said, and even as Niall was making to leave, Harry was standing and setting his pencils down. One of his odd curiosities: he always walked Niall to the door, even if it was scarcely ten feet away, even if he was in the middle of something. Harry cared a lot about… Not really manners or etiquette, which were just rules, and therefore meant for breaking, but he cared about treating people the right way. And so he walked Niall to the door and put an arm around his shoulders, pulling him into a brief hug before opening the door and herding him out into the corridor. It was always unsettling, left him feeling the strange ghost of Harry’s body for a long minute afterwards. But it was a comfort, too - to know that Harry cared about him in this strange, almost arbitrary way. It was Harry’s way of showing that he valued Niall. Or something.

He drove home through the worsening snow and thought about the album cover, and the hundreds of sketches of Niall that littered Harry’s notebooks and portfolio pages and everything. He thought about all the songs he’d love to write and sing with Harry, songs that - if he was honest, and he didn’t want to be, but it was a habit he couldn’t seem to break - might be about Harry. How those songs may never be fully realized. He parked in the lot beside his building and let himself in out of the cold and tried not to think about the melodies that were already coming to him.

-

It was stupidly complicated to get to London. They’d gotten a pre-dawn, exhausting ferry to Liverpool, and had gotten distracted there by an active vigil of long-haired hippies burning candles for The Beatles.

“Been a year, innit?” Niall asked Harry. “Time to move on, I’d think.”

Harry shrugged. “It’s nice, though. Be devoted to something like that. Don’t suppose I’ve ever loved anything as whole-heartedly as that chap loves The Beatles.” He gestured to a man who was sketching George Harrison’s profile in chalk on the sidewalk under the wavy caption, “within you, without you.” Niall supposed he didn’t either, but that probably wasn’t such a bad thing.

After circumventing the crowd they’d made it to the train station with hardly any time to spare. The train was already moving at a good clip by the time they’d found a couple of seats together and hefted Niall’s guitar up into the luggage rack.

“Next time we do this we’re just taking my car on the ferry, I don’t care what it costs,” Niall said, slumping down in the seat beside Harry. “Feckin’ trains. Too much hassle.”

Harry grinned at him. “Dunno, makes it feel a bit more like an adventure, yeah? Running to make the train, finding our way around. Proper like, lads on a mission.”

Niall rolled his eyes. “Yeah, alright. You can carry my guitar when we get to London, then.”

“Oh, Niall, you only had to ask,” Harry said. “I’m nothing if not a gentleman.” He tugged Niall’s hand up from the armrest and settled it into the crook of his elbow, laughing.

Niall thought about what an arbitrary and sincerely baffling thing it was, to be a man.

They arrived in London with time to spare, and posted up outside the train station for a spot of busking before their meeting with Simon. The record deal, while it had given them a bit of financial security, was mostly covering the costs of recording, and traveling wasn’t free, after all. Niall propped his guitar case open on the sidewalk and they ran through a well-rehearsed handful of covers, stuff people might like to hear.

“English music,” Harry had insisted, when most Niall’s suggestions had turned out American, or trad folk. “Know your audience.” 

“English audiences like American music, Harry,” Niall had said, and in the end they’d compromised, like they always did. Niall had won out with “Bleecker Street” and “8:05,” and had persuaded Harry into rehearsing “Unfaithful Servant” by whinging, “It’s Canadian, Haz, it’s neutral territory!” In return he’d given Harry “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” and “Two of Us” without complaint, as well as anything he wanted off Barabajagal. He knew Harry would pick “Happiness Runs,” a song that Niall loved probably more than Harry did. A song which they both knew they could do together, beautifully.

In the half-hour they’d been able to play before getting to their meeting with Simon, they managed to scrape together nine quid in coins. It wasn’t a bad showing - would get them back across the ferry, at least.

Fetch’s London offices were aggressively modern: women in well-cut blouses spoke tersely behind telephone switchboards; men in suits walked down hallways with purpose, clutching heavy rocks glasses of mid-afternoon whisky; the floors and furniture were all the sort of bright white that meant they were cleaned often and well; the outer offices had walls of unsmudged windows. Niall and Harry sat side by side on a white leather chaise in the lobby, waiting for Simon.

“D’you feel,” Harry said slowly into Niall’s ear, “as though maybe we should’ve gone through one of those airlock clean rooms, gotten sanitized before we came in here?” 

Niall stifled a laugh. It was a rock record label, purportedly - there were huge, glossy pictures of American bands most of whom Niall was only passingly familiar with. There was a dramatic shot of Lou Reed with his face half in shadow, and even that - his enormous, bloodshot eyes; the melancholy twist of his mouth - seemed clinical, somehow, set behind glass.

“Boys!” Simon said, behind them. Harry jumped a little in surprise and then pretended he hadn’t.

“Simon,” Niall said, standing and offering his hand. He’d practiced his handshake. He wondered if he’d ever be able to meet with Simon without absolutely bricking it.

“Good to finally get the two of you down here!” Simon said, leading them out of the lobby and down a corridor. On either side were immaculately framed photographs of bands Fetch had signed or managed. It was impressive. Niall swallowed.

Simon’s office was similarly clean, white walls hung with a couple of gold records and a large photo of Robert Plant performing with Alexis Korner. When Simon noticed Niall noticing, he laughed.

“From the first time I saw Robert,” he said, waving a hand. “When I heard Page was putting together a new group I put the two of them in touch, but I never thought it’d get so huge. Would’ve bought out their contract with Atlantic if I had!”

Niall surmised that this was meant to be a funny joke. He laughed politely. Beside him Harry lowered himself into one of the white naugahyde chairs in front of Simon’s desk. Niall followed suit.

“Not that we don’t love an excuse to come to London,” Harry started. He was fidgeting with his bag, where the painting he’d done was pressed between two thick pieces of foamcore. “But you must’ve needed something that couldn’t be done over the phone?”

“Yes and no,” Simon said. He had a strange, enigmatic smile. It made Niall nervous. “Only good things, I promise.” He walked around to the other side of the desk and opened a drawer. “First thing’s first, I thought you might like the advance on your album.” He withdrew two envelopes and slid them across the desk.

Niall felt like a blown fuse - he couldn’t make himself reach out to take the envelope. He couldn’t look at the cheque, not with Simon right there, but he knew logically it must be more money than he’d ever gotten at once before. He looked at Harry. Harry stared dumbly back at him. In tense unison they accepted the envelopes and folded them into their respective coat pockets.

“Okay,” Niall said mechanically. “So we… okay.”

Simon smiled, enigmatic. “Don’t look so nervous. This is a good thing,” he said. “Of course I could’ve sent those through the mail, so… Why the trip to London, then?” He gazed smugly between Harry and Niall, like he knew they’d never guess.

They never would. Niall was pinned in place, his mind skating through an endless runoff groove. The money, the money, the money. He couldn’t focus on anything else.

Harry was speaking. Niall blinked hard to focus. The door to Simon’s office was opening, and a young woman with heavy-lidded eyes lined in kohl was stepping through, and Simon was introducing her. She was a photographer. She looked like a photographer. She was going to take them to a studio and see about shooting an album cover.

“Don’t suppose the two of you have had any thoughts on a title?” Simon asked.

Niall turned to Harry. If there was going to be a right time, this was it.

“Actually - “ Niall started. He didn’t know where to focus his attention - on the photographer staring at him, on Simon’s candid face. He looked back at Harry, fumbling with the clasps on his bag and drawing out the painting. “We wanted to - well Harry did it but I really agree with him - we had, I guess - “ He could feel himself beginning to unravel. Harry looked up at him, nervous but sure, and untaped the boards holding the painting flat. “We have an album cover, if you’ll allow it.”

Niall was dimly aware of the photographer excusing herself. He watched Harry set the painting on the desk, saw Harry and Simon both bending to look at it. He felt wholly disconnected from his body in the moment: he could understand it breathing and living and walking to stand beside Harry as though under the command of someone else. He look a breath - a distant, tenuous thing - and willed himself to rest his palm on Harry’s shoulder.

And then they were standing, and Simon was smiling - he’d put on a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles to look at Harry’s painting, and they made him look measurably less cool, more trustworthy, somehow. He was sorting through some paperwork, the painting carefully re-wrapped on his desk.

Niall followed Harry out into the corridor. Harry’s arms were around him - and it was that, this embrace, that yanked Niall’s consciousness back into him, tethered him firmly to himself. The sandalwood scent of Harry’s neck, the rough weave of the henley Harry wore pressed to Niall’s cheek. His strong arms, his bright eyes.

Niall stumbled closer into the embrace.

They spent the rest of the day taking photographs - for press kits, for adverts, for the back cover of the album. Harry was beaming; Niall was so proud of him. He was so talented, so lovely. Such a gift, one Niall was determined not to take for granted. They left the Fetch offices in the early evening, stepping out onto the street and into a light snowfall.

Niall skidded a little in the slush and Harry steadied his elbow. He left his hand there, warm and solid, and navigated them through the press of people leaving their offices, finding their ways home. He kept one hand on Niall’s arm, and in the other he hefted Niall’s guitar case.

“Mate,” Harry said, rounding a corner onto an emptier street. “We don’t seriously have to try to make the last ferry tonight, do we?”

And Niall was exhausted, deflated from being so relieved, so happy, for such a sustained period of time. He shook his head. “We’ve been paid, right? Let’s find someplace to stay.”

They wound up posted up at a hostel on two top bunks, across an aisle from one another. The dormitory was narrow enough that if Niall had reached across, and Harry had mirrored him, their fingertips would’ve touched in the center. Niall held his own hand close to his chest.

In the morning they bought fresh palmiers from a street vendor and made for the early train back to Liverpool, where they could catch the ferry home. The sidewalks were crusted with an overnight frost. Harry wiped crumbs from his lips with the back of his hand, and Niall thought about what his mouth must taste like. Cinnamon and butter. An extravagance.

In Dublin Niall opened a bank account for the express purpose of depositing his record advance. He stared at the balance on the receipt. It was too much, set against his small wants: a wheel of good brie; a short list of American import records; a basic Danelectro shorthorn, nothing fancy.

It was nothing to his big wants, his needs; those were things which couldn’t be bought.

-

Niall spent their first American tour watching Harry disappearing with beautiful women after every gig. It was inconvenient, more than anything. Their tour manager, a reedy guy named Danny from Fetch’s American management branch, was always after Niall about where Harry’d gone off to, about whether he’d make checkout on time. Niall thought Harry should be in charge of where Harry’d gone and what he was doing.

The record had come out eventually, as records are wont to do, with Harry’s beautiful painting and suspect handwriting on the cover, and eleven original songs from the two of them split across two sides. Simon connected them with a booking agent. They spent the rest of the spring playing the club circuit in Ireland, Niall driving them back to Dublin in the wee hours of the morning so that Harry wouldn’t miss class. On those endless drives, with the dark countryside whipping past the windows and Harry asleep in the passenger seat, Niall had made a point to bury his feelings.

He’d practiced. He was good at it, now.

He leaned an elbow on the bar and pretended he couldn’t see Harry leaning close to a woman in a lace dress, her dark curls spilling appealingly over one shoulder. It was fine. He was fine. This was what you did, when you loved somebody, right? You wanted them to be happy.

Instead, Niall spent time messing around on a practice amp with some of the guys in the road crew; he got to know the band they were opening for, an English group called The Pretty Things, which were seemingly always just on the crest of a big break; he ate every roadside diner specialty across the Bible belt; he wrote down lines that he and Harry could spit-shine into something for their second album, if everything kept going well. Niall and Harry saw America together.

Six weeks after they’d landed in New York they made it to the promised land. Niall was dozing against the van window when they passed out of Nevada and through to California, and even though it looked the same - dusty wheat fields, the distant bruise of mountains on the horizon, scrubbed farmland and close, oppressive sunlight - it was as though Niall could feel himself being filled up with the magic of this place. He cranked the window down a couple inches and pressed his face to the gap. He breathed it in like he could hold it inside himself, carry it back to Dublin and release its wicked glamour there.

But of course, for every inhale there was an exhale. Niall rolled the window up and rummaged in his bag for a notebook; he rummaged in his mind for some lyric that would immortalize this moment. He saw Harry looking at him, one of his small, odd smiles drawing his mouth to the side.

“You were born for this,” he said.

“What?” Niall asked. He clicked the top of his biro four times in rapid, nervous succession.

Harry gestured. “Y’know,” he said. “This. The rockstar life.”

Niall blinked at him. Of the two of them, it was undeniably Harry who was living a rock and roll lifestyle: there’d been a handful of reviews over the tour, local papers commenting on their status as “ones to watch,” Fetch records’ latest experiment into folk balladry with some meat to it. And inevitably, every journalist mentioned Harry’s magnetism onstage, his easy and striking charisma. How well-suited he was to strut across a club, to draw eyes to himself seemingly without trying.

“Oh,” Niall said, too late. “I guess. I mean, I wanted it.” He cleared his throat. “I want it.”

Harry looked at him for a long moment. Outside, the Californian countryside gave way to small towns, to farmland, to fields punctuated by great, alien greenhouses made from girders and plastic sheeting. Niall was no stranger to farm country, but none of the rolling fields of Ireland looked like this.

It was a rough and threatening frontier, and beautiful, too.

By mid-afternoon they’d made it to the habitable coast, the hallowed ground of San Fransisco. This time, Niall and Harry were pressed to the window side-by-side, staring round-eyed at the Golden Gate bridge.

“D’you think they’d let me out here, to paint?” Harry said slowly.

“Harry, we’re playing the Fillmore,” Niall said, not taking his eyes off the vaulting shape of the bridge. “Keep up.”

“Yeah, but…” Harry trailed off.

It was actually a minor miracle, playing the Fillmore - Niall’d heard through their booking agent that Bill Graham was shuttering it for good after the summer, so he could focus on promoting arena tours. They’d managed to get the east and west locations in just under the wire on this tour. Niall was grateful and tremendously sad all at once. That he should’ve been four or five years too young for the real rock ’n’ roll scene; they’d very nearly missed everything.

“Did you ever go to UFO?” he asked Harry. “When you still lived in England?”

Harry shook his head. “I’d have loved to see Floyd there,” he said. “It’s hard to get up to London, though, when you’re young. And then when I was old enough to travel on my own I basically moved to Dublin right away, so.” He gave a melancholy one-shouldered shrug.

“You ever think, like…” Niall tried to sort his thoughts out and found them hopelessly tangled. “I mean, we’re like a Simon and Garfunkel type outfit, or something. And they’re not even, like, writing together - “

Harry made a queer sound of protest and Niall held up a hand.

“Not that I think that’s going to happen to us, Haz,” he said. “But like - d’you feel like we really missed the zeitgeist?”

The bridge was visible now through the van’s back window, the bay and the Pacific ocean splashed out alongside them instead.

“I don’t know,” Harry said finally. “I never - I mean, I guess I never thought about it. Like, doing this for real. Was going to be a painter, me.”

“Oh,” Niall said lamely. How strange it was, to think he’d had these dreams - that his dreams had only been possible because they’d been lived by somebody else already. That he’d always be striving towards that imagined ideal. Maybe Harry was better at this than Niall was because he’d never wanted it the same way. If Niall was better at not caring - or if he was more comfortable with caring too much - maybe he would’ve reached this same clarity.

In the end, the Fillmore was just a building. Every club was. Harry could go to London and visit UFO and it might still mean something to him, or it might not. Niall’s chest felt overfull. They played, and Niall spoke to a pop critic from the New Yorker afterwards, and felt guilty for not wanting to take her home. She was pretty, and made incisive comments about his songwriting, and understood things about American folk that Niall was still taking blind stabs at. In another life they might be friends.

Harry disappeared after the show with a leggy blonde girl in a satiny slip. She looked like how California sounded, in every song Niall had ever heard about it.

When they reconvened the next morning Niall lied and said he’d taken the New Yorker writer back to the hotel with him. He’d slept with women before. He had some idea of what to say.

“Boys,” Danny the reedy tour manager said, looking up from his stapled packet of travel arrangements. “The lads from the Pretty Things are going to a party tonight in Los Angeles and would like you to come, if you don’t mind hitting the road now.”

Ever canny, Harry interjected. “What sort of party?”

Danny shrugged. “Normal California type. Nothing to tell your parents about.” He winked. “It’s in Laurel Canyon, so that, y’know. That type of crowd.”

Niall glanced sidelong at Harry. Cass Elliot lived in Laurel Canyon. Joni Mitchell lived in Laurel Canyon. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were there, in turns.

“Who’s party?” Niall asked.

Danny shrugged and grinned. “Peter Tork - that chap from that TV show,” he said, and began to warble off-key, “Here we come… Walking down the street…”

Harry threw his head back and laughed. “The boyband?” he asked. “Oh, Niall, we have to go. We can’t not go to the boyband party.”

Niall laughed too, and didn’t bother to mention that he’d loved to get stoned and watch The Monkees as a teenager. It didn’t seem terribly cool to be starstruck over this.

They drove down the coast and dropped their things at Chateau Marmont, the label’s one indulgence as a celebration of the end of the tour. They’d be flying back to Ireland the morning after their last show.

Harry gazed out the window of their suite. Los Angeles sprawled below, light-colored buildings stuck out from sun-bleached streets, like the city was made from the chitinous exoskeleton of some primordial sea creature, left to rot. Hollowed out and made into something else.

“John Bonham once rode his motorbike through the lobby here,” Harry said, not looking up from the window. “D’you think the label would advance me for a motorbike?”

Niall laughed. “We can call the American offices tomorrow.” There was always a certain pleasure in indulging Harry’s flights of fancy, in pretending he was fanciful, in turn. “We’ve got to get going soon.”

-

One of those paradoxes in Niall’s life, parties. He loved a good party, loved to laugh and make other people laugh. He loved to have fun. And yet here, in a room full of people he didn’t know, crowded in against the sideboard in Peter Tork’s Laurel Canyon home, he was claustrophobic and awkward. His effervescent, party-ready personality was something he needed a moment to slip into, and he could scarcely move, let alone ground himself.

Somebody had pressed a half-glass of punch into his hand and he was gulping it unflatteringly, trying to loosen up, when there was a hand at his elbow. Niall jumped, and the man attached to the hand laughed, pulling back.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.

“No, no,” Niall said back. He took another long drink. “Just get jumpy, big crowds like this.”

The stranger nodded. He was a few years older than Niall, maybe - tall, blue-eyed. A square-jawed American in a well-cut blazer and corduroys.

“Joe,” he said, holding out his hand. Niall manoeuvred around in the crush of people until he could accept the handshake.

“Niall,” he said, in turn.

“I know,” Joe said. “I heard your album, with Fetch Records - it was really something.”

It was a nice thing to say. It was a nice thing for Niall to hear. The record was well-enough received, but they were still only starting out. It wasn’t like it’d made them rich or anything - it was still bringing in a pittance in residuals.

“Thanks,” Niall said, feeling looser already. “You a folk fan then?”

Joe tilted his head from side to side. “I guess you could say that,” he said finally. “I’m a good music fan, you know what I mean.”

“My sorta man,” Niall said, clinking the rim of his punch glass against Joe’s.

They chatted for a little while. Niall settled more into himself, more into the spirit of the party. He refilled his punch cup twice, could feel the way it was staining his mouth sugary and red. He laughed loud when Joe cracked a mean joke about Jethro Tull, and covered his mouth with his hand, and Joe smiled at him thoughtfully.

“Are you here alone?”

“I’m - nah, he’s -” Niall stood up straighter, looking around for Harry. “Harry’s here somewhere, probably off chasing skirts.” 

“Harry Styles?” Joe said, although he must know. If he’d known who Niall was, there was no way he’d escape knowing Harry. 

“Yeah, he sort of dragged me along,” Niall said. “Bit hard t’ get me out to parties in America, don’t have many friends here.”

Joe smiled. “Well. You’ve got one.”

He knocked his punch glass against Niall’s again, and left it there, so that their knuckles touched. The way he was standing close didn’t seem like a byproduct of the press of the crowd anymore. He put his other hand on Niall’s elbow.

“Do you want to take a walk with me?” Joe asked.

“I’m -” Niall said mechanically. This was what it was like to have a man make a pass at him. His mind stuck and skipped on that like a needle in a record groove. “I, uh -” 

It was then that, by some miracle, Harry materialized beside him.

“My darling,” Harry said dramatically, draping an arm around Niall’s shoulders. “It’s exhausting work charming the entire California folk scene but somebody’s got to do it. Oh, hello!”

Niall watched Harry and Joe exchange introductions, willing himself to calm down.

“Haz, can I speak to you?” he said abruptly, and then dragged Harry through the party by his wrist, opening doors until he found an unoccupied bedroom and shut the door behind them.

Harry was watching him cautiously. They were close - Niall knew they were close, were tuned to one another like two strings on the same instrument. He knew anxiety was coming off him in waves, that anybody would be able to sense it so Harry, who knew him so well, would probably be drowning in it.

“Sorry,” he said, trying to control his voice. “I just, uh, needed an excuse to get out of there.”

Harry watched him the way you might watch a stray dog, from a distance. “Why’s that?”

Niall needed to choose his words carefully. He couldn’t tip his hand here. “That man was making a pass at me,” he said slowly. “I didn’t -”

“Was he forcing it? I’ll go box his ears,” Harry said kindly. “Americans can be so forward, you wouldn’t believe some of the girls I talked to tonight.”

“No, no, he was nice, he just… I mean, he’s got the wrong idea about me, I guess.”

Harry arched one eyebrow, then studiously put it back down. “He was handsome, though - could’ve had a go of it, might’ve had fun!” Harry stepped towards him then, cautiously, daring Niall to shove him away. “Try anything once, right?”

Niall frowned. Because it was easy for Harry, because he was already being written up in NME as a playboy, a broody songwriter with a penchant for women. He could afford to try anything once.

“That’s not -” he started, fully intending on finishing the sentence in a way that would both assert his own heterosexuality and chastise Harry for speaking about things he had no expertise on, but Harry interrupted him.

“Niall, it’s 1971, people are allowed to be gay.”

“But I’m not gay,” Niall insisted, and it felt heavy and viscous on his tongue. A lie you had to spit out or it would live inside your mouth forever.

“Okay,” Harry said gently. He was humoring him. Niall resisted the urge to sock him in the jaw, if for no other reason than he was pretty sure he didn’t know how to throw a punch without injuring himself. “I’m just saying, people are gay. David Bowie is gay, and he’s fine.”

“David Bowie’s not gay, he’s married.”

“He’s not not gay.” Harry frowned. “Why are you so upset about this?”

Niall was suddenly close to tears. It didn’t matter if David Bowie was gay, or if the man flirting with him at the party was gay. It mattered that he had secreted this truth in a small, dark, cramped place inside of himself, had allowed it to wither without light or water in the hopes that it would simply cease to exist. He had been so sure of his methods that he had nearly believed they were working.

And Harry had seen right through him, to the feeble truth of him.

“Please don’t ask me that,” he said. His voice was beginning to go high and hysterical. “Please, Harry, can we just pretend this didn’t happen?”

“Oh, Niall,” Harry said, and that was all it took, really.

As if from a great distance, Niall registered the way his legs pleated beneath him, bringing him to the floor. Harry knelt over him and wrapped his arms around him. One big hand stroking the back of Niall’s head. And even though he was crying, the room seemed muffled and silent, the way a city street feels after the first snow. When there’s no room for sound, when every sense is muted by the thrilling shock of the cold.

He hadn’t said anything, not really. He had said everything.

“I’m sorry.” Niall pushed the words into Harry’s chest, into the hollow of his throat. He had brought Harry to the sun-drunk western edge of the States and had failed him, had fallen in love with him, or with the idea of being with him. It was a sharp thing sticking into him, the fact that Harry must know. “I’m trying.”

“Oh, love,” Harry said into his hair. His hand drew around to cradle Niall’s cheek, to tilt his face up. Harry’s big thumb brushed over his cheekbone and came away wet.

Harry kissed him.

The party downstairs frothed with laughter. Outside, the moon hung low and heavy over Laurel Canyon. Its light silvered the leaves on the trees and the grass and the pavement, the patchwork of the physical world. A night bird sounded its high, lonesome call.

“Why did you do that?” Niall said after a long moment. He put a clumsy hand to his mouth.

“I wanted to,” Harry said, and did it again.

The house was mostly empty by the time they found their way back down to the dregs of the party. Peter pointed them towards a spare room, a minimally furnished sleeping porch with all the windows thrown wide. The damp night air was heavy with the scent of primroses.

“All yours,” Peter said, and returned to accommodating anyone who couldn’t be trusted to drive home.

It was curious, the way Niall felt like they were more and less alone, somehow. The moonlight came in through the rows of windows to make a strange tessellation of light and shadow on the floor, the edge of the bed, Harry’s legs. Niall let his eyes follow this trajectory up to Harry’s waist, the way his broad shoulders made his torso look powerful and blunt. He looked at Harry’s face. It was - as it always was - essentially kind.

Harry held out his hand. “Come to bed with me,” he said. “You don’t - I’m not -” Harry laughed. If Harry was nervous, Niall supposed he could afford to be a little less anxious. It was a matter of equilibrium. “I wouldn’t hate a cuddle right now, I guess.”

They climbed into bed together. Harry held Niall’s hand between them. The humid night and everything it had contained seemed to press them down, and against one another.

Niall liked to be tidy. In his home, in his songwriting, in the way he conducted his friendships. He was a neat person. He found a place for everything he needed, and if he couldn’t find a place for it, he didn’t need it.

He realized now with a queasy sort of giddiness that he had been waiting, all along, really, for someone - for Harry - to come and make a mess of him.

-

Harry woke early to the sound of birds. The house was surrounded on every side by greenery, and the sunlight that poured in was verdant and wild, somehow, out here. He had slept beside Niall on the guest bed on the sun porch, and he sat up now admiring the way every wall let in the new daylight. How they were boxed in by windows, as though they sat in the center of a glass lantern, the burning apex of all that heat and light. Radiant.

He moved through the house in his socks and pants and nothing else, finding his way to the kitchen and putting the kettle on. Every kind of tea in the cupboard was of the herbal remedy sort, smelling of feet and vegetable peels. Harry sniffed through a few boxes and came up with something moderately inoffensive; made two steaming mugs of it and carried them cautiously back to the sun porch, where Niall was still asleep. He had one arm under the pillow and the other crooked over his head, like a bird’s wing, like he was protecting himself from the touch of the sun.

Harry studied his bare back: its constellation of freckles and moles; the dimple under his shoulder blade from the way his arm was raised; the gentle dip of his waist where the sheet was pulled up. One spindly leg stuck out from under the sheets, so that the rumpled linen seemed to ebb around him like a high tide against a shoreline.

Harry drank his tea.

There was a difference, he thought, between being careful with Niall’s feelings and being so precious with him that he could hardly bring him within arms reach. Harry studied the motion of Niall’s ribcage, the way the vault of it rose and fell slowly as he breathed in his sleep.

This beautiful boy, Harry thought. I love this beautiful boy.

Sometimes Harry was so overwhelmed by the beauty and bounty of the world around him. It made him so helpless. He was completely untethered, reaching out into the marvelous world to hold onto anything he could, just for a little while, before it slipped through his fingers and he was sent tilting and reeling again over some brilliant, impossible new vista. That he had come to Dublin to paint, in what seemed like another lifetime, and had stuck his arms out into the world and hauled Niall back in with him, had kept him so close for so long… Harry shut his eyes and inhaled shakily.

He was the world’s first aviator. All this unreachable, unexplored territory suddenly open to him, perilous and breathtaking and holding against him the promise that it would all end in flames for him.

There was a difference, he thought, between being careless with his own feelings and risking it all to go just that little bit further into the bright unknown.

When Niall did stir, it was slowly. Harry watched him the way one might observe a time-lapse photograph: every frame nearly identical to the one before it; every motion a genuine thrill. Niall stretched his arm up over his head and his shoulder creaked. His wrists creaked, and every joint in his legs. Harry wanted to gather him up and hold all of his limbs in place for him. He seemed so… Fragile wasn’t quite the word, more like, insubstantial. Like he was a bundle of thread all threatening to come unraveled in Harry’s hands.

“Niall,” he said softly. “Are you waking up?”

Niall unburied his face from the pillow slowly, so that after a moment Harry could just see the fringe of his eyelashes, then the side of his nose, then, hesitantly, the corner of his mouth.

Niall made a shape like a word into the pillow.

“‘M up,” he mumbled, turning over. He raised himself up onto his elbows, so that the freckles all over his shoulders shifted. Harry wanted to kiss him there, to drink him in. He held himself very still.

“How’s your head?” he said, finally. What he wanted to say was, how’s your heart? More than that, selfishly, how are you feeling about me right now?

Niall shrugged, which answered all of Harry’s questions more-or-less adequately, and then said, “That tea for me?”

Harry held the mug out to him. When Niall shifted to sit up, the sheet fell away from his chest and pooled at his waist, and Harry felt a visceral stab of regret. That they hadn’t had sex; that he hadn’t attempted to put a name to the many-colored disaster of his feelings for Niall; that he’d kissed him, and had left himself no recourse to do so again.

“We’re playing the Whisky tonight,” he said.

Niall smiled around the rim of his mug. “I know,” he said. “Closing tour off right.”

The two of them were already booked to open on a continental European tour starting in two weeks, barely any time to rest, to enjoy the abject laziness Harry had previously associated with summers. When their album had gotten its first review - an effacing one-liner from Robert Christgau belied by the B+ he’d given it - Harry had quietly visited the registrar’s office and deferred his enrollment for one semester.

It was, as people said, all happening.

Up here in the hills the light was different. It was as though he was looking at Niall through the warm, yellowed lens of a Polaroid camera. His eyes seemed emphatically blue in his face. Harry wanted to kiss him again. He wanted to never stop kissing him.

“Thank you,” Niall said. He cut his eyes to the side, so that Harry couldn’t be sure what he was being thanked for: the tour, or the music, or last night, when Niall had needed him and Harry had done the only thing he could think to do.

“Sure,” Harry said. He got up then, and found his clothes where he’d left them, tossed over the back of a chair, and dressed. The Whisky A Go Go tonight. Home tomorrow. The day after, the rest of their lives, he supposed.

-

When they got back to Ireland Harry moved his things into Niall’s apartment. He didn’t have much - a couple suitcases of clothes, his easel and paints, a cardboard box of records and books that he found homes for easily among Niall’s things.

They did it by mutual, unspoken agreement: Niall showing up at Harry’s dorm during the last week he was allowed to be in it, the trunk of his car emptied of its usual burden of spare tire and toolkit. They loaded Harry’s things in together. Harry watched the ropy muscles in Niall’s forearms shift as he hefted a suitcase into the backseat. They rode together to Niall’s and unloaded everything, and stood in the kitchen doorway as if pinned there by everything they’d left unsaid in California.

Then, by some miracle of effort, Niall had leaned up and kissed Harry carefully on the mouth.

Harry was relieved, he was grateful not to have to bridge the gap twice. He’d fallen into Niall’s arms and kissed him, and kissed him. They’d fallen asleep side by side that night and woken tangled together, Niall’s mouth pressed to the back of Harry’s shoulder. Harry had turned around in his arms.

“Hi,” he’d said, and kissed Niall, his mouth mossy with sleep. It was intimate - it was more so, somehow, here in Ireland where they had lives and obligations and ambitions, to steal this moment together. California had felt like some enchanted mirror world, where Harry could have whatever he wanted, but couldn’t bring anything back with him. And by some alchemy they had managed to carry this thing home between them, this seed of something else.

Niall was quiet in Harry’s arms, kissing him, opening his mouth to Harry’s kisses. The light coming in from outside caught and held the dust motes in the air. The bed shifted beneath them. How they’d failed each other by not doing this sooner.

Harry loved him. Harry was loved by him.

He pressed Niall back into the mattress and kissed the hollow of his throat, his freckled shoulders. He wanted to murmur sweet things to him, to put what was happening into a context where it was familiar. Harry had been with men before, at art school, but not very many, and none to whom he could apply the enormity of feeling threatening to burst out of him. He flattened his tongue against Niall’s chest and held him closer when he shivered.

“D’you want…” Harry said, hiding his face against Niall’s neck. His mouth went shy around any way he could end the sentence. He drew his hand down to grab Niall lightly by the hip instead. Even this seemed too forward, too much, at first.

Niall swore under him and grabbed his wrist, pressed Harry’s hand further down. “Okay,” he said. His throat bobbed against the side of Harry’s face.

They didn’t make love. In point of fact, they ended up getting one another off in rapid, embarrassing succession and laying beside each other in the brightening morning, touching all along their sides while Niall tried halfheartedly to convince Harry to get up so he could change the sheets. It was this bit of normalcy that Harry clung to. He stretched out along Niall’s side and wrapped his arm and leg around him, pinning them together. Niall looked over at him, annoyed and, beneath it, radiating that same vulnerable anxiety he’d had the night they’d first kissed in Laurel Canyon. Harry felt awash in tenderness, and he held him closer, leaned in to kiss him with his eyes open.

After that morning they’d lived two discrete lives: Harry got a part-time job waiting tables while they were between royalties cheques from the label; they gigged around town together to stay sharp, and to ride the success of their American tour; they wrote scraps of songs in the park on warm days, or down the pub on cooler ones. Harry stopped by the record store where Niall still worked some days, to see what releases had come in, what was worth learning.

At home, though, they dove into one another. Harry would arrive home from work after dark, the collar of his shirt open, the plummy night sky outside an invitation to be reckless. He would tumble into bed beside Niall and pull him over the top of him, kiss him until his lips buzzed and he had to bury his face in Niall’s neck. In the mornings, they would stand together in the kitchen and make breakfast before work, a pot of coffee percolating on the counter, their arms carelessly around one another as Harry rinsed grapes in the sink or bothered a pan of scrambling eggs.

They had fallen properly in love. Harry thought he’d like to marry Niall someday, if it was even something that could be done. If married were an emotion, Harry felt it.

How strange it was, though, to seclude their relationship like this. Like the two of them were an illustration and no painter had bothered to fill in the background. They were suspended on a canvas, vague shapes drifted together, nothing to tether them to the earth.

Their royalties cheques came in. Harry had been planning to quit his job at the restaurant in advance of their European tour, and instead he asked the manager if he could come back afterwards, and had felt bodily relieved when he’d said yes. Niall took on extra shifts at the record store. They lived simply. If riotous success had come to them immediately, Harry told himself, it would’ve felt unearned. It was better this way, to really work for it.

It was while they were on tour, opening for another faceless blues-rock band trying to follow in Zeppelin’s wake, that they heard about the Navigator split.

“Ed Sheeran’s gone crazy,” Niall had said, flipping through a newsstand copy of Circus he’d bought with their coffee that morning. “Done a full Syd Barrett.”

“Who?” Harry asked. He was standing at the bathroom sink in the motel room the label had gotten them, shaving the stray hairs that he’d been watching hopefully accumulate on his upper lip. It was no good - Niall had a healthy shadow of stubble but Harry just wasn’t blessed the same way.

“Y’know that group, Navigator?” Niall sang a couple lines from one of their songs, a bluesy ballad that had gotten a lot of radio play the summer before. “Their singer. Done a runner in the middle of tour.”

“Why?” Harry asked. He filled his cupped palms with water and rinsed the shave cream off his face. It’d barely made a difference, but he looked cleaner, he supposed.

“Dunno,” Niall said. “Bit past the prime era of, like, acid casualties.”

“Some people are late bloomers,” Harry said. “It’s a shame, though. I liked that tune.”

Niall had gotten up off the bed and come around to stand behind Harry at the sink, his arms around his waist.

“I’ve got the record,” he said. “We can listen to it when we get home.”

“They finishing out the tour?” Harry asked. He turned around to better situate himself in Niall’s embrace.

Niall shrugged. “Their keyboardist sings, maybe they’ll just. I dunno. Three pieces are very en vogue right now.”

It wasn’t a particularly clever joke, but they both laughed anyway, a side effect of being young and in love and persistently amused by one another. Harry put his arms around Niall’s neck and swayed with him under the fluorescent bathroom light.

“D’you remember slow dancing with me on New Year’s?” he asked.

Niall nodded. His expressive face had quieted, settled into the small smile he always wore when they were alone together.

“I wanted to kiss you then,” Harry said, because it was true. It felt fantastically bold, to say it out loud. Bolder still, to lean in and do it now.

“Do you remember when we learned to play Tam Lin?” Niall asked, after a moment.

Of course Harry did. It had been arresting, Niall in his studio that day, with his ruddy face half in shadow and his strange, intricate thoughts pouring out of him.

He nodded.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Niall said, pushing forward to hold Harry properly, chest to chest. Niall sometimes arrived at a point without elaborating the steps he’d taken in between, leaving Harry feeling wrong-footed and stupid at the last touchstone of the conversation. Whether he was afraid to say what he’d really meant, or if he’d known that Harry would understand the shape of what he was trying to say, if not the specifics, Harry was never quite sure. He held him anyway.

 _Hold me tight and fear me not,_ he thought to himself. He would always be afraid of his feelings for Niall, probably. Of their enormity, and how they seemed to take indiscriminately from the two of them, and reward them, yes, but unpredictably. How they’d come so far just to crave this simple thing, being together, holding one another.

Would they have fallen in love if not for the music? Would they have known each other at all?

Hold me tight and fear me not. Harry could do one of those things.

-

When they returned to Ireland life resumed much the way it’d been in those strange weeks between tours. The days were shorter, and colder, and to compensate Niall picked Harry up from the restaurant on nights he worked late, and the two of them made enormous pots of soup together on their rare free evenings. They wrote more songs together. They made ambiguous plans for the future.

“When the next record’s a big hit,” Harry would say, standing in front of the open oven in two jumpers warming his hands. “We’ll move someplace with central heat.”

Niall would come up behind him and press his cheek against the top of Harry’s spine, leeching his warmth. “Our own thermostat,” he would say. “Imagine.”

Harry imagined quite a bit. He had a fig tree’s worth of possibilities for his and Niall’s life together - where they became fabulously wealthy musicians and rented a Swiss chalet to spend eleven months of the year in tax exile; where their record languished in ten pence bins and Harry returned to school to support them both as a commercial illustrator, while Niall got a job doing session work at Pye Studios or someplace like that; where they moved back to Los Angeles next summer and had a Bohemian social life, always poor but never lonely. In every future he imagined they were together.

They were gigging around town more and more, too. Their royalties cheques had continued to be underwhelming in the face of expenses for gear, for petrol, for basic living expenses. They’d planned to get together the money for a down payment on a small house, nothing fancy but a place where they’d be able to write their second album without disturbing the neighbors. It was looking more and more like they’d be renewing the lease on Niall’s apartment together.

So Harry had checked the status of his deferment.

Just to be safe. Just to know what his cards were. It was becoming more and more obvious that full time musician work wasn’t going to pay their bills yet, and they’d have something to fall back on.

He’d brought back the paperwork to re-enroll, which in retrospect, had been a mistake.

Niall was on the phone with their booking agent when he’d gotten home, and he’d dumped his things on the table and collapsed on their bed. He could hear the comforting sounds of Niall making a list: his “mm-hmm”ing into the phone receiver, the scratch of his pen bracketing headings and subheadings and making bullet points when they became relevant. It was an eternal comfort to him, to be with someone so competent.

They would always be looked after, as long as Niall was able to make lists.

Harry was half-way to a mid afternoon nap when he heard Niall get up and start moving around. He wondered half-idly if Niall might join him in bed, if they might find a better way to occupy themselves before Harry fell asleep.

“Did you solve all our problems?” he asked, his mouth half-muffled by the pillow.

“Getting there,” Niall said. He sounded distracted. Harry stretched, to give Niall something else to be distracted by.

“Come here,” Harry said finally, ready to be gratified by Niall’s attention. He didn’t care if he had to ask for it.

“Are you going to enroll again?” Niall asked, and Harry opened his eyes. Niall’s voice had gone that particular flat note that meant he was trying not to sound upset.

Harry shrugged. Niall didn’t like to feel like he was being actively reassured. He would become quarrelsome and prickly and they’d fight for days over nothing if Harry tried to use a gentle hand here.

But he was delicate, he had feelings just under the surface. He needed to be told, without being told, that Harry was devoted to him.

“I thought I should know what all our options are,” he said carefully. “In case anything happens. I mean, Fetch might not option our second album, if these are the returns we’re getting.”

Niall’s face closed off in that abrupt, pinched way it sometimes did. In moments like this Harry always had the curious, unhappy feeling that he and Niall were standing further than arm’s reach from one another, and that the lacuna between them could never be filled. Harry would pour all his love into it and it would reach halfway, ebbing towards Niall like a tide pulled by the moon. And Niall, guarded to a fault, would stare down at the shoreline on his side and see it dry, and he wouldn’t look up long enough to see how hard Harry was trying to reach him.

“Do you want out?” Niall asked. “I should’ve… I’m sorry I didn’t ask you sooner.”

Niall’s brand of defensive could be so infuriating. He was so willing to eject at the slightest provocation, it made Harry nauseous every time it happened. Any time their relationship gained any ground, took any risks, Niall was there with the option to just give up. And it broke Harry’s heart every time, that Niall had been made so closed off, so afraid of the tremors of his own heart that he’d nearly rather not have them.

Harry wanted to hold him.

It also made him completely impossible in moments like this.

“I don’t want out,” Harry said. “I want in, Niall, I want in forever. Christ, I _love_ you.” He’d never said it out loud like that before. He wished he hadn’t sounded so angry.

Niall paused. He set down the paper he’d been worrying in his fingers and came over to sit on the edge of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, smaller. “I just didn’t think it would be this hard.” He took a deep, juddering breath. “I guess I thought we’d know what we were doing, all the time, once we had a record deal.”

“I did, too,” Harry said. “Sometimes things don’t work out like you planned.”

“I know,” Niall said. “I don’t like it, but I know.”

They sat together in silence, close but not touching.

“I don’t have to decide right away,” Harry said finally. “But if things don’t change in the next couple of months I think I should re-enroll. As a fallback option.”

“Okay,” Niall said. He swung his skinny legs up onto the bed and laid down next to Harry. It was distinctly unsexy, both of them shaken from the effort of looking their relationship directly in the eye. “I don’t know if this is the best time but I lined us up some gigs,” he said.

“Sure,” Harry said. He put a hand tentatively on Niall’s, between them. “Let’s hear it.”

“The opening band dropped off the Ireland leg of Navigator’s tour,” Niall said. “Because of, like, nobody wants to see them without Sheeran so it’s barely turning profit.”

Harry turned over enough to put his head on Niall’s shoulder. “Sounds like our kind of gig,” he said.

-

Navigator was full of nice guys. It was a shame what had happened, how lost they seemed without a frontman. They were great players, the three of them.

Harry and Niall discussed this in the car between gigs - they were only playing four shows with Navigator, all right in a row around Ireland, and they’d been canny enough just to take Niall’s car, not bother with renting a van or asking the label for crew. They were a simple outfit. They liked being alone with one another.

“Christ, Zayn can sing, though,” Harry’d said after their first show opening for Navigator, at a club they’d played many times in Dublin.

“Yeah,” Niall agreed. “No clue what to say between songs, but that’ll come. Might land on their feet, those guys.”

“Guess we’ll see,” Harry said.

Without Sheeran, there were three of them: Zayn, calm and whip-thin in a well-cut black waistcoat behind the broad silhouette of his Hammond organ; Louis, sharp and just a little bit dangerous looking in expensive ensembles of appliqué jeans and open shirts, dwarfed by a Rickenbacker bass that could’ve payed Niall’s rent four times over; Liam, beery and sweet behind the drum kit. Niall wasn’t sure if Liam owned any shirts - he’d never seen him in one.

“Carl Palmer doesn’t wear a shirt,” Liam had pointed out when Louis complained about his state of perpetual undress.

“Carl Palmer’s better-looking than you,” Louis had said back.

Liam had shrugged and smiled at Niall, passing by, with the long-suffering expression of someone who’d made their bed and was content to lie in it.

They were all nice guys.

In fact, Liam had even bought a copy of Harry and Niall’s record after hearing their set. He refused when Niall tried to give it to him for free.

Louis had bought them both a round of drinks and taken up an hour and a half of their evening telling veteran stories about his first stint as a touring bass player and all the mischief he’d gotten up to.

Zayn learned the chords to “Fool’s Gold” and came up during their set the second night to perform it with him, his elegant hands sure and nimble on the keys. Niall couldn’t remember a nicer time they’d had on the road with a band.

So it wasn’t shocking, quite, but it was unexpected, when Zayn invited them out for drinks after their last show together.

“How are you finding it?” Zayn asked enigmatically.

“What?” Niall said.

Zayn gestured all around them, to the noise of the club after a show. “You know. Fame and fortune and all.” He had a brambly northern accent that didn’t match the painterly angles of his face at all.

Behind them, Harry had swayed to the bar and was trying to flag someone down to take his drink order. Niall watched him for a moment, then looked back at Zayn.

“We’ve had the record out, obviously,” he said. “And it’s doing, y’know, it’s doing well.”

“Is it?” Zayn lifted his glass to his mouth and let the rim of it rest there, just barely indenting his bottom lip. He must know the way he looked. It must be deliberate, how beautiful and vulnerable and untouchable he always seemed, all at once. “Because nobody else would’ve taken this gig, like.” He drained the glass. “Us on our last legs and all.”

Niall didn’t know quite what to say to that - it would be rude to agree that Navigator was breathing its death rattle; it would be an obvious lie to pretend otherwise.

“Well,” he hedged. “We’re still starting out. Publicity to be had and money to be made here.”

Zayn pursed his lips. His doe eyes narrowed. “If your album’s selling the way people say it’s been, you should be turning profit. You shouldn’t be taking any crap gig that’ll have you. What percentage are you making in residuals?”

He’d set aside his glass and was looking Niall keenly in the eye. It was unfair that he could be so ethereal, could play the way he did, and have such a sharp sense of the business of music.

Zayn could look after himself out here, as an artist, as a part of a band. Niall had used his bank account twice in the seven months he’d had it. Harry kept his tips in a coffee can in their apartment.

“I don’t know,” Niall said honestly, because Zayn could clearly tell. “We’re seeing the album sell but we’re not seeing much return on it.”

Zayn steepled his fingers. “Mate, I reckon the suits at Fetch have done you a bad turn,” he said, like it was an unemotional fact. Niall was grateful - he wouldn’t have been able to stomach Zayn’s pity.

“Reckon so,” he said. “Don’t suppose you know any lawyers?”

Zayn signaled a passing waitress and gestured to his glass, holding up two fingers. Harry had vanished from the bar. Niall missed him acutely for a moment.

“I did ask you down for a drink for a reason,” Zayn said, accepting a pair of scotch and sodas from the waitress and passing one to Niall.

“Right, sorry - “ Niall said. He took a bracing swallow of his drink and set it down on the table between them. “I should find Harry, give me a mo’.”

Zayn put a hand on his forearm. “That’s - “ he started. “Listen, we’ll just talk, okay?”

Niall resettled himself. It felt strange, to be “just talking” with anybody he admired as much as Zayn Malik, chief songwriter and now singer for Navigator, without Harry beside him. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

“You’ve seen the articles, I’m sure,” Zayn said, not bothering to clarify. Niall nodded. “I’ve been to see Ed in hospital, and he’s doing, y’know. Bit better, all things considered.”

Zayn’s kohl-dark eyelashes fluttered. He stared into his drink a moment before lifting it to his mouth.

“That’s good,” Niall said, to fill the silence. “Mate, that’s great.”

“He’s not coming back,” Zayn said. “Moved back in with his brother this week. We’re at, like, a bit of a loss.”

“Oh.” He’d been doing the mental math, had assumed maybe Zayn was going to invite him and Harry to open for them on their next tour with Ed back in fighting form. If that was off the table, Niall wasn’t sure why they were talking. “I’m sorry,” he said, lamely. “You were one of my favorite bands.”

“Were?” Zayn asked.

“Well, I mean…” Niall rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess you’re, you could still perform as a three piece.” Their set that night had been mediocre at best. Niall thought it best not to point this out in so many words.

“No offense meant, Niall, but is Harry the smart one?” Zayn said. “I’m trying to be delicate here and you’re…”

Niall swallowed the rest of his drink and set his glass down hard between them. “No clue what you’re talking about. Just say it. Fuck delicate.”

“We’re down a guitarist and we’d like you to join up.”

Niall would’ve choked on his drink if he hadn’t finished it.

“Zayn, we’re under contract with Fetch,” he said. “I don’t expect I’m allowed.”

Zayn waved a hand dismissively. “You asked if I know lawyers, I know lawyers. We can get you out of the contract.” He finished his own drink and set the glass aside, fixing Niall with his big, amber eyes. “You’re not making money off your record. You’re a damn good guitar player. I’ve heard your stuff - I want to write with you.”

“I’d have to talk to Harry,” Niall said finally. “We can’t just, like, join a band, there’s considerations to make first, but - “

Zayn’s expression stopped him. His mouth had gone thin and thoughtful, his heavy brows drawn together. “You know, like, if you joined up… We’re full time, you’re not going to be like, keeping the side project. I thought Harry was going back to art school, anyway.”

Niall didn’t bother to ask where Zayn had heard that. It had just seemed like such an absurd notion, that somebody would want Niall and not Harry, that Niall had just assumed. Navigator would absorb them both. He looked at the apologetic, embarrassed turn of Zayn’s handsome face and knew he’d been wrong, and wasn’t quite sure how to parse that.

“I need some time to think,” he said, finally. He needed a lifetime. He needed this opportunity to have come before he’d gone and fallen in love, with Harry, with the music they made together. 

“We’re considering a few options,” Zayn hedged. He dug a hand into his trouser pocket and withdrew a heavy linen business card with his name and number on it. “I’m not kidding, though. You _are_ the short list. But we need an answer by the end of the week.” 

Niall accepted the card. He felt dizzy, from the drinks, from Navigator’s wanting him. From Harry’s obvious absence. And then, as if summoned, Harry appeared, a foamy glass of lager in each hand. He scooted in beside Niall in the booth. Niall shoved Zayn’s card into his pocket and took the beer. 

Harry was laughing boozily beside him, the top four buttons of his loose shirt undone. Niall tried to reach back to the drive they’d taken to the club that afternoon, when Niall had been content to take Harry’s hand across the gear shift for a moment. When any simple gesture had felt like more than enough. He caught Zayn’s eye, and Zayn raised his eyebrow, inclined his head subtly towards Harry, as if to say, _go ahead, tell him the good news._

Niall blinked, and he shook his head once. _Not yet._ His fingers closed for a moment around the business card in his pocket, making sure it was still there, and then he turned to Harry, tuning in just in time to hear the punch line of his rambling joke, and to laugh when he was supposed to. 

They got a cab home in the pearly pre-dawn light. Harry drew all the blinds and lay beside Niall in their bed, raising himself up on one elbow to bend down and kiss him before falling quickly and heavily asleep. Niall laid awake with his thoughts until he was sober, until he could fight sleep no longer. 


	2. Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newly five-piece, Navigator record an album and take on the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay i did warn you it was a WIP and to proceed with caution. soz for the wait

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel  
Talking so brave and so sweet  
Giving me head on the unmade bed  
While the limousines wait in the street

Leonard Cohen, “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” (1974)

 

Woke up alone in this hotel room  
Played with myself, where were you?

Harry Styles, “From the Dining Table” (2017)

 

-

 

_1968, Birmingham, West Midlands_

 

Liam was holding a beer in each hand, with no intention of drinking either. One he was holding for the bloke he’d been standing with during the opening band’s set, a bratty-looking know-it-all named Louis, who’d gone to the toilet and left Liam standing alone. The other, if he could make it to the other side of the the theater, was for the opening band’s keyboardist.

“Mate,” Louis said, reappearing and wresting his beer out of Liam’s hand. “Ta very much.”

Liam nodded. He was trying to find the clearest path over there. He was trying to compose what he wanted to say, and he could already tell, Louis was the sort of person who always had a one-liner ready. He pushed through the crowd, away from Louis, towards the little table where the band - The Albatross, they were called - were crowded around chatting with a few girls.

“Oi!” Louis called, following behind him. _Christ._ “You gonna talk to those lads?”

“I might,” Liam said. “If I could get a moment to myself.”

Louis had made his way around to walk pressed next to Liam in the crowd, and he turned his head to give him an affronted look.

“I thought we were friends!” he said indignantly.

Liam shrugged. “I thought you talked your way through their entire set while I was trying to listen,” he said. It wasn’t like Liam to be overtly rude, but he was between bands himself, and he’d heard a rumor the drummer out with the Albatross at the moment was temping while they held auditions for a permanent replacement. He needed a steady gig if he was going to get anywhere out of this crap town.

“Right, well, that’s basically friends, innit?” Louis said. Liam couldn’t shake him.

“Just - “ he said, but the crowd parted and he found himself suddenly standing beside the lads from The Albatross, their keyboardist raising his eyebrows at Liam and Louis, mid-argument.

“Hi,” Liam said, straightening up. “I, uh, this is for you.”

He held out the plastic cup of beer. The keyboardist stared at it for a moment, then looked back up at him.

“You’re sweet, but like, I’ve got a girlfriend,” he said.

Beside Liam, Louis was choking with laughter. Liam could feel himself blushing. Without stopping to think, he lifted the cup to his mouth and chugged the entire thing. He grabbed Louis' cup from his loose grip and drank that as well, for good measure.

“Mate,” the keyboardist said, looking mortified. “It’s okay, like - “

Liam crumpled the cup in his fist and dropped it to the floor. He offered the keyboardist his hand. “My name’s Liam and I want to drum for your band,” he said. He could tell he was speaking too loud but he couldn’t seem to turn his own volume down. “I have my own kit. Beer does _not_ taste good, why does nobody ever tell you that.”

“Zayn,” the keyboardist said, shaking his hand cautiously. “I mean, I’m Zayn. Are you alright?”

“Never better,” Liam said, though he was beginning to feel distinctly less than good.

“Louis,” put in Louis, helpfully. “Friend of Liam’s.”

“He’s not.”

“Mate, you could probably use one right now. Anyway,” Louis said, turning back to Zayn. “You auditioning drummers?”

“Yeah, we’re bringing some guys in next week.”

“Mind giving my close personal friend Liam a chance?”

Zayn stared at Louis, then at Liam. Then, through some blurry logic, he was writing his phone number down on a slip of paper and handing it to Liam.

“If you make it home alive,” he said, sounding skeptical, “You can call me tomorrow. Yeah?”

“Cheers,” Liam said, and then he was aware of Louis dragging him away by the elbow, and then of being outside in the bracing cold.

“What the fuck was that, then?” Louis said good-naturedly. “He’s pretty, sure, but like… Don’t lose your head.”

“I think I’m drunk,” Liam said. He leaned against the brick facade of the building closed his eyes.

“Calm down, you had one beer.” Louis was digging a cigarette out of a crumpled pack and lighting it. He offered it to Liam. “You got his number, anyway. Good on ya.” He winked.

“He’s got a girlfriend,” Liam said. And he was straight. He was, mostly, straight. Probably. Liam liked to stay away from any sort of introspection if he could help it. “And anyway, I was serious, about the drums thing. My last group split up and I’m sick of doing jam bands. Want to be a proper touring, y’know, touring drummer.”

“Maybe you _are_ drunk,” Louis said. “You’re not, like - a really large child, right?”

“‘M seventeen,” Liam said. “I just don’t drink. I’m not supposed to.”

“Ah, lad,” Louis groaned. “Did you drive here?”

Liam nodded. He held up his car keys.

“Oh, hell. Well, let’s get you home,” Louis said, taking Liam by the arm and walking him to the car park. “I’m going to drive you, don’t argue, I’m saving your life.”

“Okay,” Liam said. He supposed they were friends now. He handed over his keys. “I live in Wolverhampton.”

 _“Jesus,”_ Louis said. “I’m a good fucking samaritan, Liam… What’s your last name?”

“Payne.”

“Well, Payno, be ready to owe me a favor for the rest of your life.”

Louis was an absolutely terrifying driver. More than once, Liam had to cling to the loop over the passenger side door as Louis took a turn too hard. The GTO was a hand-me-down from his sister’s boyfriend, and it’d seen its share of poor driving, but it deserved a more dignified death than the one it was liable to get with Louis behind the wheel.

“Christ, mate, _slow down,”_ Liam said as Louis rocketed around a corner in his residential neighborhood. “We’re nearly there, would love to make it home in one piece.”

“That’s no fun,” Louis said, jerking the wheel hard to turn onto Liam’s street.

“Do you even have a driving license?” Liam asked, steadying a hand on the dashboard.

“I know how to drive, Payno,” Louis said. He was squinting, trying to read the house numbers on the other side of the street.

“That is _not_ what I asked,” Liam said.

Louis just grinned, coming to a stop in front of Liam’s house. “Don’t suppose you’ve a spare room for wayward good samaritans?”

He was going to have to explain this to his mum and dad. _Jesus._

“You can kip with me,” he said reluctantly. “Just don’t be, y’know… Don’t murder my sisters or anything.”

“I’ll try to restrain myself.”

They more or less passed out top to tail in Liam’s single bed, and by the time Liam woke up Louis was gone, like some recklessly driving phantom. He’d written his phone number on the same scrap of paper Zayn had given him, labeled both, and jotted down, “Let me know how it goes!” on the other side.

And he hadn’t even stolen Liam’s car. He had to resign himself to the fact: he and Louis were definitely friends now.

 

_1968, Bradford, West Yorkshire_

 

It helped that Liam was a good drummer. Zayn wasn’t quite sure what to make of him, otherwise. He had an unselfconscious sincerity that made Zayn want to blush on his behalf - how could somebody say the things Liam said and not be embarrassed?

“You’re a special sort of songwriter,” Liam had said to him on his second rehearsal with The Albatross, and it was so obvious that he’d _meant_ it that Zayn had wanted to put his face in his hands.

By the end of their next series of local gigs, everybody seemed to more or less know the band wasn’t going to get much further. They’d had some good buzz but no luck finding a recording contract, and their bass player was accepting a factory job just south of his hometown, and it seemed like it was time.

“You know, Louis plays the bass,” Liam said during one of their last rehearsals. “He could probably play some pickup gigs with us.”

“Louis?” Zayn asked.

“You know, my friend from… When I met you the first time, he was with me?”

Zayn had a vague recollection of a sharp-faced little chap who seemed louder than he reasonably should be. Somebody exhausting. Nothing like Liam.

“Babe, I don’t think getting The Albatross a new bass player is going to solve the problem,” he said, as kindly as he could.

Liam’s face fell. Zayn wasn’t that much older than him, but it felt, sometimes, like he was a thousand years old. Nothing much made his heart race, anymore; nothing crushed him the way Liam looked like he was being crushed right now.

“But -” Liam said, his heavy brows drawing together. He was so boyish. Zayn was endlessly charmed by it, and it softened him, made him want to cooperate with anything Liam had to say.

“Look,” he said, before Liam could protest any further. “I’ve been talking to another Yorkshire lad, right? Guitarist with a great voice. Not much of a looker, like, but that’s why we’ve got to have you.” He ducked Liam under the chin with two fingers.

“Yeah?” Liam said.

“Sure.” Zayn leaned up against the wall and looked Liam square in the face. “You’re a good drummer, lad. I’ll be calling you.” He paused. “Be easier if you’d move up here, honestly. There’s work to be had for a good drummer up here.”

Liam looked skeptical. “I do alright in Wolvo, honestly. Think Alexis Korner’s going to let me tour around with him a bit this spring if I’m between bands.”

That wasn’t nothing. If anything, it made Zayn a little more anxious to hang onto him. Alexis Korner was a big deal, a stepping stone for a lot of undiscovered talent to find more permanent positions elsewhere.

“That’s great,” Zayn said. “But like…” He shook his hair back from his face. It might be time to rethink the whole long haired hippie thing. “Don’t lose my number, yeah?” 

“I won’t,” Liam said seriously. “Zayn, I think you’re the real deal.”

Zayn wanted to hide his face, it was so earnest. He showed Liam out after rehearsal and sat down at once to page through his notebook, find that guitarist’s number and see if he was still interested in putting a group together. He had a drummer he wanted. Louis’ sharp face surfaced in his mind. He might even have a bass player, at that. 

The first rehearsal of the band that would eventually be called Navigator took place in an unused storefront a few weeks later.

Zayn and Ed had gotten together on a few writing sessions in the interim, sorting out what sort of sound they thought they’d want out of a group: bluesy, with homage paid to the traditional songs of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Ed had a keen eye on modern trends, American rhythm and blues, while Zayn brought in disparate influences from jazz and classical. They’d had a hell of a time just jamming.

When they had the bones of a few good songs Zayn had called Liam and asked him out to stay for a long weekend so they could rehearse, and, against his best judgment, had suggested he bring Louis along. They would need a bass player, after all.

It was to his shock - and slight disappointment - that Louis had an incredible melodic style of playing. It electrified the group. Ed, in particular, loved the idea of the bass as a lead instrument, leaving his guitar to fill in rhythmic interest; the band matured from there, with a clear direction to be divined just by the composition of its members.

Despite himself, Zayn felt himself getting excited about all the things he could do with this group. Not with _a group,_ or even _a group like this one,_ but with these specific musicians, in this configuration, at this moment in the vast, rotating universe.

And then the mechanisms of practice and habit took over, and they were on their way. Zayn had done time in enough groups to see the way everything would slot into place with them - he and Ed shared songwriting duties, sometimes apart, sometimes together. Liam and Louis’ peculiar friendship was distilled in the way they played together, listening to one another, a little competitive, and that gave the group its distinctive sound. They tore through a rash of potential names in their first gigs until, in Ed’s van on the way to an audition for a local festival, they stumbled on it.

“Which exit am I taking, Liam?” Ed asked, peering at a directional sign on the side of the expressway.

“Liam doesn’t know,” Louis hollered from the back seat. “No sense of direction, him.”

“He’s got the map,” Ed pointed out, over Liam’s affronted noise.

“Yeah, but,” Louis said. “He’s not the navigator.”

In the end they’d had to pull over and sort the directions out between them, and Zayn had mulled it over. He liked the word, which could be variously applied to any of them, if need be: Ed in a somewhat literal sense, because he knew where things were and kept track of their dates and meetings and important phone numbers; Louis as a keen negotiator, taking point in any discussion with a booking agent or promoter who he thought would try to stiff them. Zayn flattered himself in thinking that he could be credited with the musical direction of the band, the one with the most finely tuned ear. And Liam, who’s affable nature and genuine heart kept them all from getting too frustrated with one another, from going off the rails.

What’s more, they were all headed in the same direction, that is, onwards and upwards.

They landed that festival, and several more over that overlong summer. It was fitting, Zayn always thought, that it’d ended up being remembered as the _summer of love,_ because that’s how he always felt about it, privately. A little bit in love with all of it - success, and money, and his boys, who’d brought it all to him.

He’d sat with Ed in a hotel room in France during a week-long stopover between festivals where they’d been contracted for a couple of club gigs and they’d watched the televised footage of Woodstock together.

“Wouldn’t see that in Yorkshire,” Zayn said, gesturing at the screen with a lit cigarette. On it, a grainy roll of black and white footage was being shown, a slow pan over the emptying fields that had housed the festival. The footage was indistinct but the entire field was pockmarked with debris, the chalky shapes of tarps and blankets caked with mud, the sloppy queues of people heading for their cars, unsteady on their feet, hauling their things over their shoulders. There was a closer shot of a woman’s bare calves, streaked with dirt, her bare feet stumbling in the mud. A shot of a child in its father’s arms looking around at the detritus of the festival.

“No,” Ed agreed. He was rolling a joint on the cardboard sleeve of a record he’d been carrying on the road, a new release from a couple of guys he’d known from the club circuit in a shitty little band called Mabel Greer’s Toy Shop. Wherever they went, Ed kept putting the record on and humming along. “We should tour America.”

Zayn shifted back on the bedspread. The television cut to a news presenter speaking quick, measured French and he got up to turn down the volume. The light from the screen cast a greyish, sickly light over the dark room. Ed lit the joint, the rasp of his lighter loud and sharp between them.

“You don’t think we should wait?” Zayn asked finally. “We could book an entire continental club tour in the fall. We could do England again while we record an album, really firm up our reputation there.” He knew it was dreadfully unromantic, this dour pragmatism that sometimes came spilling out of him, but he couldn’t help himself. Zayn wondered if he would ever stop feeling like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, if the small miracles he’d patchworked together into a life would ever seem anything but temporary.

He thought about Liam, when they’d first met, and how young he was, how optimistic. How with Louis’ self-destructive bent and Ed’s fickle heart it might well fall to Zayn to make sure they didn’t do anything stupid just yet.

He wasn’t ready to give any of this up, no matter how the crossroads bargain nature of fame sometimes chafed at him. The rest of that summer he discussed it periodically with Ed - they had the material for an album, and their label rep had telephoned Zayn to tell him that Andrew Loog Oldham would be available for a couple of weeks after their last festival date to help them put it together. They could get something into the shops by November, and if it sold well, there was a tour overseas waiting for them in the new year.

Zayn had never been good at planning things in advance. He told himself it was why the music he wrote was so well-received - he wasn’t outlining songs with verses and choruses, he was allowing the melodies to come alive under his hands as he needed them. It was why, for every group he put together that fell apart, he always managed to land on his feet, ready for the next thing. He had resolved to never rely too much on anyone else, and it had sheltered him.

But those naive teenage promises one makes to oneself don’t hold forever, and the more he was drawn into this life as a part of Navigator, the less vigilant he became. He wrote a song with Ed called “Objects in Motion” which had found unexpected and dramatic success on the radio; Nick Grimshaw at the BBC had put it on heavy rotation every morning until Zayn couldn’t go anywhere, the supermarket or the bank or anything, without hearing it coming from somewhere. Even if it was far away and indistinct, the low melody of Louis’ bassline made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

They’d become, as a band, ubiquitous, and ubiquity went hand-in-hand with fortune and fame.

And everything was alright for a while. Zayn had looked for the cracks in the foundation that had handicapped his last bands and found nothing. They recorded an album and toured it across Europe, and took a long summer opening for The Who on the back of their meandering rock opera, _Tommy._

“Lots of filler,” Ed had said when they’d sat down to listen to the record. Zayn thought he was probably right, but Liam and Louis were so starstruck by Moon and Entwistle he didn’t want to agree out loud. “But it’s a good idea, you know. A concept. A story. Could run with that, us, do it better’n them.”

Maybe they could. Maybe they’d be the second wave of the British Invasion, them and Led Zep and Bowie, Delta blues and skiffle and jazz and whatever they damn well felt like. Ed could tell a story, though, and Zayn wanted to get back into a studio all of a sudden, put those idle thoughts to tape.

Touring carried them almost all the way through the next year, though, and by the time they were beginning to look at producers and engineers and time off, a fault line had come unstuck in the band. Zayn was the last to notice, all that pragmatism sloughed off under the stage lights.

“Zayn,” Liam had said quietly, crouched beside his snare drum to tune it. They were playing one of a series of warm-up shows in Scandinavia, preparing for another American club tour, then a few bigger venues when they toured the UK later in the year. Their promoter had been busy. Every time Zayn got him on the phone he felt like he ought to be taking notes and studying them, like he was going to be quizzed.

“Yeah,” he said. They had enough crew that he wasn’t asking the lads to help him move his Hammond anymore, and he was idly supervising them from a few yards away, wondering if he had enough kroner floating around in his jacket pockets for a pack of cigarettes. “Sorry, what?”

“Ed seem okay to you?”

Zayn blinked, focused on Liam’s earnest face. “What d’you mean?”

Liam shrugged. He wasn’t as bad with words as he thought he was; Zayn waited patiently until he gathered his thoughts and continued.

“Just, like… He’s been off, at gigs. Not on the beat, y’know, and that’s not like him.” Liam’s peculiar rosebud mouth twitched into a little frown.

“It’s been a long tour, man,” Zayn said. He was ready to placate. With Liam his instinct was always to soothe him first. Only he was right - even as Zayn was searching for the words to reassure him, he remembered the stiltedness of their performance the night before. “Hey - I’ll talk to him, yeah?”

Liam smiled gratefully, his sweet face collapsing into a relief of premature laugh lines. Zayn sometimes marveled at the capacity for love in himself, when it came to Liam. To all of them, really.

The thing about long tours, though, was that for all you were crowded together, it seemed so much harder to find a moment of genuine intimacy. Zayn had nudged Ed in the shoulder with his knuckles on their flight to America and given him what felt like a _significant look_ as he said, “You been alright?”

But Ed had laughed his beery chuckle and shrugged and said “Life, innit?”

And that was the best Zayn had been able to do.

 

_August 1971, San Fransisco_

 

Wheezing up another sloping road alone in the middle of the night, Zayn began to have some regrets about not trying harder to get Ed to open up. He’d walked offstage in the middle of the gig and not come back on, and the owner of the club had insisted in a convincingly frightening way that they finish the show as a three piece. As soon as they’d been allowed off Zayn had taken off running, searching the maze of back hallways in the club before looking around the nearby alleys, the bars and restaurants, anywhere he thought Ed might fuck off to.

The wheels had been coming off the band more or less since Europe.

“Fuck,” Zayn said under his breath, rounding a corner and hurrying down a side street. He could be fucking anywhere. He’d been making, just… less and less sense, in a manner Zayn had chalked up to tour fatigue. They’d all been flagging, and Ed was wearing it worse than the rest of them, but he kept disappearing places, not showing up for bus calls, locking himself into the ensuite with the hotel phone dragged in, its cord trailing across the floor and tripping Zayn up any time he tried to get up or go anywhere.

As sensible as Zayn had tried to be in the beginning, all his practical futures were crumbling around him.

“Ed,” he shouted into the night sky. “You absolute dickhead!”

He rounded another corner, and there, sitting on the stoop of a closed storefront with his guitar flat on his lap, was Ed.

Zayn approached him the way you might approach a feral cat. Ed’s round, pale face looked vague in the moonlight, his glasses sitting askew. He was methodically and seemingly unconsciously detuning his guitar until the strings flopped loosely against the fingerboard.

“Hey, man,” Zayn said slowly. He reached out and put a hand on Ed’s shoulder, and Ed turned to look at it, as though he’d forgotten he had shoulders, or that he inhabited a body at all.

“Hey Zed,” he said. “Working on something.” He gestured to the useless guitar.

“Yeah,” Zayn said. “Let’s take it back to the room, we can finish it together, yeah?”

Ed nodded slowly and let himself be pulled to his feet. “We going home after this?” he asked.

They were, for a few days, but they had the UK leg after that, and the studio tentatively booked after Christmas. Zayn sucked his bottom lip into his mouth, thinking how best to lay it all out.

“I’d like to go home,” Ed said plaintively, though, and that was that.

From the hotel, Zayn called Ed’s brother in Suffolk and arranged their flight details so that he could meet them at Heathrow. He put Ed to bed and took Liam and Louis aside and told them what had happened, asked them what they might like to do. If it was up to the three of them to decide.

 

_December 1971, Londonderry_

 

It was Louis’s idea, actually. He’d mentioned it in passing to Liam, almost as a joke - the band was going down the tubes already, but here was this great guitar player stuck in some nothing folk duo, might as well bring him along, right?

And Liam told Zayn, and Zayn laughed, but the thought hadn’t left him alone.

They’d done their entire UK tour as a trio and hadn’t fallen apart. It was a testament to how well they played together that they could carry the songs without Ed. It was a testament to Ed’s talent that nobody much wanted to see them try. And when their promoter had called and given them a list of Irish dates that would be worth decent money, since nobody wanted to play Ireland much with everything going on, they’d thought, why not?

Go out with an interesting death rattle, put themselves in harm’s way a bit. Zayn was feeling that youthful indestructibility that comes with having one’s dreams slowly unraveled - he wasn’t much bothered by a teenager with an armalite.

And they’d had the opening act: some truly blistering guitar, Bert Jansch meets Hendrix meets Django Reinhardt. He’d been stuck on that sound.

They sang nice, too, sweet love songs and ballads and all, but Christ could their guitar player take a solo and do something with it.

The idea germinated between the three of them until it almost became a foregone conclusion: _when Niall’s playing with us we’ll write something like this,_ or, _Niall could take a solo on Objects in Motion, easy._ Zayn had been nervous asking him down for a drink; moreso when he’d brought Harry with him.

It was obvious they didn’t want to be without one another. Zayn fumbled the proposal and was left sweating, waiting for Niall’s answer, so that when it came conditionally on the phone a week after their last gig together, he’d forgotten to barter and just said yes.

“You’ll take us both?” Niall asked, disbelieving. His voice sounded tinny, coming all the way across the sea to Zayn’s London flat.

“The more the merrier,” Zayn said dumbly, not knowing how to walk it back. “If he wants to, I mean.”

Niall laughed, loud and infectious, and then he was giving Zayn the name of their label rep, the man who he’d need to speak to if he wanted to buy them out of their contract. It was going to cost a fortune, Zayn was sure. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He reminded himself what Niall played like, that it would be worth it.

And then they rang off, with plans to meet up in London once the spring thaw began.

Zayn called Ed and spoke stiltedly to him about the outpatient rehab center he was in, and didn’t mention the band at all.

 

_May 1972, Devonshire_

 

The farmhouse was a serendipitous find. Nestled into the verdant Devonshire countryside, with a crumbling facade of slate-colored stones, surrounded by fields and cow pastures and buttery, golden light, it was exactly the sort of atmosphere they’d needed. Liam had driven down with Louis in his GTO, so that by the time they arrived they’d been trapped in close quarters for nearly five hours, all Liam’s drums crammed in around them and Louis’ bass sat up front in his lap. It was a minor miracle they hadn’t killed each other.

Niall and Harry had spent the last week in May moving their things into a storage space outside of Dublin. The lease was coming due on their apartment, and with the entire summer spent writing and much of the fall in the studio with Navigator, there was no real argument to renew it.

Harry watched Niall putter around, dusting off the tops of the cabinets and the lintels of the doors, confidently spackle over the cracks in the plaster. He packed plates and linens and books neatly into boxes and labeled them in his careful, girlish handwriting.

His competence was sexy. It was emblematic of the care Niall took with their relationship, even though it obviously still scared him. Harry got weak in the knees watching Niall scrub out the bathtub, or talk to the electric company on the phone. If it sometimes fell to Harry to nurture the emotional side of their relationship, he couldn’t complain: Niall handled every other practicality.

So they’d packed up and moved out, taking a couple of suitcases of clothes and Niall’s guitar and a few sundries in the boot of the Morris Minor and had taken the ferry over, watching the rolling, green hills of Ireland recede behind them as they moved further from shore.

“Are you going to miss it very much?” Harry had said, crossing two of his fingers over Niall’s on the seat between them.

“Yes,” Niall said, then: “Maybe. I’m excited to spend time where you’re from.”

“We’re not going to be anywhere near where I’m from,” Harry said.

“Well, no, but.” Niall was unreadable, the sharp angles of his brow and nose limned in the grey morning light. “Could drive up, one weekend. If you wanted.”

Harry had met Niall’s family, several times by that point, but as a coworker. He supposed they could make the long journey to Holmes Chapel and Harry could say to his mother, “This is Niall, who made the album with me, and isn’t it strange that you’ve not met him yet? We write music together.” He wanted to be able to say “This is Niall, we’re important to one another” and have it mean exactly that. He didn’t want to get tied down in specifics. It felt very dangerous to be specific with his feelings for Niall: once they were named, they could be made vulnerable.

But Harry couldn’t lie to his mother.

“Could do,” he said. “You’d like Holmes Chapel.”

Niall didn’t answer, but a sweet smile flickered across his mouth. He could look so severe in profile, with the straight, emphatic lines of his brow and nose, the blunt shape of his chin. Harry had been a student of the shape of Niall’s face for so long that he could follow those angles by memory. When he smiled, his entire face seemed to soften and change. It was a small thing, but Harry was laid low by it every time.

“I love you,” he said, unable to bear it.

Niall turned to him and blinked, his reserve drawing back up, but underneath, Harry could tell he was pleased. He always was, when Harry was reckless with his affection.

“Me too,” he said, and nudged his hand against Harry’s.

 

-

 

The Morris Minor had nearly admitted defeat three times by the time they made it to Devonshire. When the wheel-worn road turned to the right and the estate sprawled out beneath them, like a film set, or a waking dream, Niall couldn’t help parking right there on the road, the engine idling, and getting out to have a look.

To the north there were pastures, a crumbling church, a cemetery, the seamed fields of neighboring farms. To the south the trees grew wild, sliced through by the serpentine shape of a river glinting in the sun. Ahead, west, towards the riotous sunset, was the farmhouse, a glorious old wreck decaying before them.

There was a utility van parked out front, which meant Zayn, with his Hammond, must already be there. Sure enough, when Niall had gotten back in the car and started down the long drive, Zayn materialized on the front steps and waved them over.

“Thank god you’re here,” he said to Harry. “I need someone to help move the organ.”

“Niall can help,” Harry said, stretching luxuriously as he got out of the car.

“Hey,” Niall said reproachfully. “The tax you pay for looking the way you do is having to help people carry their heavy things.”

“Oh?” Harry asked. “And what way do I look?”

Niall pulled a face and flexed one of his ropey biceps. “You know. Like you’ve lifted weights before and you want people to know.”

It was thrilling to flirt with him like this, out in the open. Harry stuck his tongue out and went to help Zayn with the heavy lifting. He could hear Harry talking, saying, “You know, Keith Emerson’s a lot shorter than you and he moves his Hammond by himself every night,” and Zayn laughing. He could smell the rich soil and the vivacious greenery, no city smog to choke out the natural world out here.

They’d made themselves more or less at home when the sputtering, worrisome sounds of Liam’s GTO came puttering down the drive to greet them. The car followed soon after, and then Liam and Louis poured out of it, both waist-deep in some kind of argument with one another.

“A Precision is a boring choice, Payno,” Louis said. “You’ve got to pick the instrument, stylistically, that suits your playing.”

Liam raised his hands. “It’s a classic for a reason, is all - “

“You say that,” Louis said, tugging his bass case out from the front seat, where it’d been balanced between his knees. “Y’know, but I don’t know how much you know about the bass. About any instruments besides the, you know.”

Liam was hauling a stack of drum cases out of the boot, his cymbal bag slung over his shoulder.

“They’re an instrument, Tommo,” Liam said, looking dismayed. “I learned to play them.” His sweet face was just beginning to look annoyed.

This was one of Niall’s favorite tendencies of the band, though: as Zayn began to wander out towards them, determined to make peace, Louis set his bass case down in the grass and strolled over behind Liam to wrap him in a tight embrace. Liam, encumbered by his drums, could do nothing but laugh, delighted and pacified. His whole face crumpled into laugh lines, and he leaned back into Louis’ arms for a moment.

As something of a hopeless - well, _helpless -_ romantic, Niall couldn’t help but bask in the presence of love. He watched Zayn take Liam’s drum cases from him and set them in a stack on the grass before joining in the hug.

Harry appeared at his side.

“Are we still technically a third wheel if there’s two of us and three of them?” he asked. He was joking, smiling, but in the way Niall knew meant he was feeling insecure and wanted to be reassured.

“They want us to be here,” Niall said. “You could go over there, you know, I don’t think they’d mind.”

Harry shrugged. He didn’t seem terribly interested in pressing his luck.

Niall leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder, and tipped his head to rest it against Harry’s. The lie had left his tongue feeling mossy.

 _They want us to be here._ They did, now, he guessed, but they were long past the point where he would ever be able to tell Harry how that first meeting had transpired.

 

-

 

Zayn liked the ready conveniences of living in a city. He had agreed to rent the farmhouse in Devonshire for the summer against his own better judgment, because he knew that a reliable wellspring of creative energy lived at the intersection of new surroundings and slight discomfort. His own best musical triumphs had come to him after he’d been jostled out of familiar routines: moving out of his parents’ house; quitting school; keeping the band going, after Ed left.

And it was important to take the time to get to know one another. If everything went alright they’d be touring together soon, and often, and while people didn’t have to be friends to work together, necessarily, it couldn’t hurt to be prepared for… Well, to be prepared.

He thought it would be for the best, if they got used to the idea of a couple in the band _now,_ so they’d know what to do, if… Zayn had a lot of potential endings to that sentence, none of them especially appealing. One of those ironies, that he’d taken the initiative to finally hire a stand-in for Ed, and it had him doubting any rights to leadership he’d previously taken for granted.

But he’d meant to bring them a guitarist, not a songwriting duo.

Louis had given him a thorough browbeating.

“We never said bring them both in,” he’d hissed, and Liam had looked confused and nervous, which made Zayn churn with guilt. “You didn’t even talk to us first!”

“It was the only way he’d do it,” Zayn defended himself. “And anyway, I don’t want to be a frontman, we should have somebody with charisma.”

“Whatever Ed’s got it’s basically the opposite of charisma and we did alright with him,” Louis said loudly, flicking the pickup switch on his bass over and over again so that it buzzed in alternating frequencies. Zayn swatted his hand until he stopped.

“Listen,” he said. “Let’s give it the summer, see if we can make something of it. Can we just please try?”

So they were trying. It helped that Louis and Liam seemed to genuinely get on with Harry and Niall, it was a relief. Zayn was terrible at matchmaking couples and hosting parties and all those things that meant making people who weren’t predisposed to feel comfortable with one another get along alright anyway. Zayn was very good at playing the organ and he’d much rather be left to that.

 

-

 

Harry was proud of how well he’d adapted to the band.

In the beginning, writing music with Niall, he’d hesitated before contributing any of his lyrics, before making suggestions to a melody or a chord progression. They’d been so tentative with one another, the two of them dancing around their potential for greatness for six entire months before it’d begun to come together. But Niall had made a musician out of him, and he was still beside him, supporting him, working out his melodies.

Their first day in the farmhouse they’d moved all the instruments and amps and everything into the big front room and just spent time finding a sound. Liam sent them all away for a full half hour while he tuned his kit so that its acoustics fit perfectly with the house - some evenings Harry would be in the bath on the opposite side of the house and still be able to hear Liam practicing paradiddles with perfect clarity.

In the mornings they all sat around the big kitchen table drinking coffee and planning the day, and in the afternoons they warmed up and practiced the back catalogue and wrote together, and it was actually going _well._ Their first week they’d come up with a rollicking rock song they were tentatively calling “Horse Fever,” and Harry was always getting the guitar riff stuck in his head, humming it to himself while he wrote letters to his mother or went down the market for eggs and bread and things.

Over the weeks they churned out more and more music, some to scrap, some to keep. Zayn had a folio of staff paper that he was going through fast, writing out chord charts and melodies and lyrics in his soft, squarish handwriting.

Niall wrote a love song for Harry, its lyrics obscure and beautiful and sad, somehow. After they’d set a demo to tape Harry pulled Niall into the kitchen and kissed him and tasted the wistfulness in his mouth. Harry didn’t know how to get Niall to stop grieving the difficulties of being in love.

Summer began to wane. The overlong sunsets shrank and the evenings turned breezy and autumnal. In the surrounding farmland, hands were hired to harvest crops, to drive them to market.

In their little farmhouse, they harvested crops of their own.

 

-

 

Joni Mitchell’s _Blue_ had come out the summer Niall and Harry were touring America, and Niall had bought it in a shop somewhere out west and brought it home. He’d kept it the crate with the rest of his records, distracted by the startling newness of Harry, how immediately they’d changed from friends and bandmates into something else. All that long, perilous autumn he’d listened to _Ladies of the Canyon,_ because he already loved it, and it made him think of the things he loved about Harry. They’d laid in bed together listening to Woodstock and wishing they’d been there, enraptured with each other. Niall had kissed Harry without hesitation and he’d felt free.

But when they’d packed up to go to Devonshire Niall had brought _Blue_ amongst some other records, thinking he might not have given it a fair chance, and he’d been listening to it so much it was beginning to warp. On this particular evening he and Harry were in the bedroom they shared in the old farmhouse, the portable record player hissing and pouring Joni’s voice out into the room.

Harry sang quietly along, holding Niall’s hand loosely, dozing. “Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time,” he sang, bringing Niall’s hand up to kiss it.

“This song is so sad,” Niall said. “I can hardly listen to it.”

It wasn’t true. He couldn’t bear it, but he listened to it often, dropping the needle in the fine groove towards the center of the record that came just after River. He ached at the same frequency as this song, somehow.

“It’s not all bad,” Harry said. He let go of Niall’s hand and turned over on his stomach. “It’s beautiful. It’s about something that was beautiful.”

“It’s about something that’s not there anymore.” Niall stared up at the ceiling. At the corner of his vision he could just see the dark ruffle of Harry’s hair. “It’s about falling out of love.”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. He shifted, so his sculpted cheek and jaw loomed into Niall’s field of view. “I think, like… There’s something romantic about it. How they’re not together anymore but they’ll never be without each other again. Doesn’t it…” He paused, looked down at Niall. “Isn’t it sort of incredible? Being so in love you become one another, a little?”

“Is it?” Niall asked. _Are you? Are we?_

Harry shrugged and hummed along to the beginning of the next song.

Zayn had tactfully asked Niall what he would do if things with Harry didn’t work out, and Niall hadn’t wanted to entertain the possibility. The fact that he’d been the person Navigator had wanted to recruit seemed to hold less and less weight, with Harry bringing his incredible songwriting, his voice, his charisma to a band that desperately needed it. More pressingly, Niall didn’t want to consider what his life would be like if he had to be without Harry. Would he go back to holding everyone at arm’s reach, to ignoring things about himself he now knew, undeniably, to be true?

In some ways it had been easier, but it might have killed him, left unchecked. He couldn’t say how long he would’ve lasted without Harry.

But the alternative seemed equally impossible: becoming famous, trying to have a private life, going on discreet dates with men? It _must_ be done: there were gay celebrities, people with a lot more to lose than a rock band and a record deal, but it seemed insurmountable. Where would he meet these men? How could he trust them not to out him in a newsstand rag?

The only path he’d ever considered for himself after he and Harry had properly gotten together was one that contained and sheltered the both of them, together.

“I love you,” he said, and Harry smiled, and bent down to kiss him.

“I love you, too,” Harry said.

It was easier to say it now than it had been at first. But then, Niall had always been a good liar.

They lay beside one another on the bed. The record ended after a moment - Niall could hear the hiss of the stylus skating into the runoff groove, the bump as it reached the end. The record player here was one of those automatic action ones, so the arm lifted and returned to its cradle with a disjointed scherzo of clicks and whirs.

He felt the crazy urge to get up and put the song back on so that he could look into Harry’s eyes while they listened. He wanted to push Harry down on the bed and lay over him, reading him. He wanted to let himself be subsumed by the physical act of sex with Harry, to get him out of his clothes and not think about it anymore.

He wanted to cry.

Beside him, Harry had retrieved a paperback and was propping it open with one big hand, reading. He looked like he might fall asleep soon. Niall didn’t know how he could always be so unbothered, as though relationships were just things that continued and functioned and could be relied on. Niall always felt like he was defusing a bomb, like any fumble would set off a chain of events that would bury the two of them. He chose his words carefully, and he measured the magnitude of taking Harry’s hand, or kissing him behind a closed but unlocked door. There was an instinctual calculus which was always warning him when he neared the edge of too much, when he ought to keep his hands to himself.

Harry’s eyelids drooped, and he shifted, so that his head was on Niall’s shoulder.

“This is hard, isn’t it?” Niall said. He hadn’t meant to, but there it was.

“Hmm?”

The sounds of the countryside had become familiar to them, so late in the summer. Niall could hear the far-away sound of a tractor, could smell the fug of weed smoke drifting up from where Zayn had posted up on the portico. Zayn was humming, and the evening was still enough, the bedroom window thrown wide enough, that Niall could tell exactly which of their new songs he was puzzling through.

“What are we trying to do, Harry?” he finally asked. “I mean - what are you trying to… What do you want?”

Harry’s head, a warm, heavy weight, lifted from his shoulder. “What do I want?” he asked.

Niall failed to suppress a nervous bubble of laughter. It came out pitchy and strange.

“I just don’t know what we’re _doing,”_ he said. There was no specificity to the feeling. He couldn’t describe it, only look at Harry in desperation and hope he somehow understood. Harry had always been so good at just understanding Niall.

“What do you mean?” Harry asked. “Like, the band, or -”

“Don’t be stupid,” Niall said, and he watched Harry’s face turn stony. He wished the music was still on: it was too quiet without it. Below them, Zayn had stopped singing.

“I’m not stupid,” Harry said quietly. “I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

“No, I know,” Niall said, reaching for him. Harry moved away, shuffling to the other side of the bed. “It’s just -”

“If one of us is stupid,” Harry started. He made an odd gesture in Niall’s direction, a shrug, like, _wouldn’t it be you?_ “I mean, we’ve been together a year now and you’re still, what… Muddling through? Am I not going slow enough for you?” His voice had gone cold, and his warm, green eyes had turned flinty and unfamiliar.

“I just -” Niall started.

“I can’t spend this entire relationship convincing you to stay,” Harry said. “At some point we have to be in this together.” He took a deep, shuddering breath through his nose. “You can’t just… Love me after I tell you all the reasons you’re allowed to. You have to love me for yourself, or you may as well not love me at all.”

An overlong sunset bathed the room in rusty, orange light. Somewhere far off in the house Louis and Liam were having an argument. It was too ordinary and too beautiful an evening for a fight like this.

“I’m going to sleep on the couch tonight,” Harry said finally.

He did, and the next morning he collected all his things from his and Niall’s shared room and moved them into one of the other oddly shaped bedrooms in a far corner of the farmhouse. Louis, always too perceptive, looked back and forth between the two of them at breakfast a few days later and opened his mouth to speak before thinking better of it and starting up some meaningless argument with Liam instead.

The last week of true summer passed with startling efficiency. Even if something in Harry and Niall’s relationship had shattered, it didn’t show in their songwriting. That was an acute pain Niall didn’t like to acknowledge, that the bitter things spilling out of him into melodies were ones Harry understood perfectly because he was on the other side of them. They put lyrics to the things they couldn’t say to one another.

They borrowed the Stones’ mobile studio and laid out the tracks for _The Compass_ in the farmhouse’s big front room over their final four days, all of them playing together.

It was a hit, of course. Didn’t it always happen that way? You put so much of yourself into a thing, you hope nobody else will ever look at it, will ever see how transparent you are. Niall was hoping for the album to sink quietly like a stone. He could untether himself from the band, from Harry, and go back to Dublin and try something else.

Well.

To say it was Navigator’s most successful album to date would’ve been an understatement. That fall, “Waxing Gibbous” stayed at number one on the hot one hundred for five consecutive weeks, and finished out the year without leaving the top ten.

They mimed behind a backing track on Top of the Pops, Louis glowering as he plucked at his unamplified bass for the cameras. The label sent baskets of fruit and champagne around to all their houses. Niall got extravagantly drunk alone in his brand new London flat, with the radio turned up and the mid-afternoon on-air host playing their songs.

He hated “Waxing Gibbous.” He hated having painted his feelings for Harry in such an obvious color palette.

It was during this strange ascent into stardom that Louis got engaged, and the band came around to bring him gifts and congratulations. They were having a “small get-together,” which in Louis’ parlance should’ve meant pints and takeaway, but because of the money rolling in and people’s newfound investment in Navigator - a band that could reach new heights - it’d been turned into some label do, with the private dining room of a posh restaurant rented out and everybody glad-handing around pretending to know everyone else.

Niall had met Eleanor a couple of times, when she’d visited the farm in Devonshire over the summer, and he was always struck by how sharp and competent she was; a perfect antivenom for Louis.

They made one another laugh.

Niall watched them from across the party. It was the stupidest, smallest things: Louis’ hand lingering at El’s waist, steadying her as she leaned over to speak to someone; Eleanor flagging down somebody from catering to bring Louis something to eat; the obvious way that, even though they were enjoying the company, they were most interested in talking to one another.

It was so hard, sometimes, not to be bitter.

Harry brought Niall a scotch and soda and they stood together on the outskirts of the party, watching the way fame was sure to swallow them up if they waded any further in.

Standing beside Harry like this, Niall felt as though he were training himself to live on the scent of an orange alone. Every instinct in him told him to peel back the skin and consume it whole, every part of him ached with hunger. Harry, standing near enough to touch, but not touching him; Harry, making one of their inside jokes, the sting intensified because they were still _friends,_ somehow.

“Cheers,” Harry said, knocking his glass against Niall’s.

The European tour was kicking off in five weeks.

Niall drained his glass.

 

_Summer 1973, America_

 

Harry was beginning to get used to the gulf between Niall and himself. He would watch Niall as if from the opposite side of a canyon, would observe and love him from a distance. There was a part of him at first that had believed the march of time would bring bridges, advances, that they would rejoin on one side or the other, or fall into the gap and meet one another at the bottom.

But they’d spent the entire European leg of the tour holding each other at a distance and, as they sat apart from one another on the chartered jet on the way to America, a stewardess bringing around cocktails and sliced fruit, Harry began considering how he might move on from all this. If he could bear to stay in a band with Niall, feeling the whole time as if he was viewing him from the wrong end of a telescope, or if he’d have to find something else to do.

He laughed, remembering: he was technically still on deferment from art school.

They landed in New York and were immediately escorted to a meeting at EMI’s American offices, and then to a press junket, and then to a hotel, but not for nearly long enough. They had a singer-songwriter support act they were meant to meet, one of the label’s new signees.

“It’s politics,” Zayn had said. “She’s already coming up in the states but nobody knows her abroad. And we’ve not sold as well here as we have back home, so. It’s what they call a relationship of mutual benefit.”

When she walked into the office, a hard-sided guitar case clutched under one arm, Harry was shocked to discover he already knew her.

“Harry Styles, as I live and breathe,” she said, setting the case down.

Harry glanced at Niall and could tell from the carefully blank expression on his face that he recognized her, too. They’d all met the summer before last, on Niall and Harry’s first American tour, after a gig. Harry had taken her back to his hotel room and had a perfectly lovely time with her.

“Taylor,” he said, opening his arms to embrace her, because what else could he do? The last eighteen months had held so many detours and twists that even if he’d known she was a musician back then - he hadn’t - he could never have predicted they’d be working together. He hadn’t known if they’d ever make it back to America. He’d never even kissed Niall, an event which now so defined him that he could barely contemplate a time before, except in an abstract sort of way.

But there was nothing abstract about Taylor Swift. She was practical and professional, and she took careful notes as their label representatives discussed the tour and promotional obligations and all the other minutiae that Harry never paid attention to.

She had all her blonde curls pulled over one shoulder, out of her face as she made a meticulous bullet-point list. She wore a dress with an interesting silhouette, broad sleeves that rippled and moved when she shifted her arms. It was made out of something gauzy, studded with printed cabbage roses, the sort of pattern you might find on a set of bed linens. As she had two years ago in a pair of high waisted bell-legged jeans and a peasant top, she looked exactly of her moment, delicate and elegant and well put together.

She played a couple of her songs for the band, her guitar-playing intricate and strange, in an odd tuning, maybe one cribbed off Joni Mitchell or Nick Drake. She wrote beautiful, interesting music. Harry was humbled by her.

They played New York and Boston, and the wheels began to turn.

“Surprised to see me again, I bet,” Taylor said to him in the green room after one of their early shows.

“Would you rather me lie?” Harry asked, and she laughed. “I don’t think you told me you were a musician.”

She shrugged and tucked the long waterfall of her hair back over her shoulders. “If I had, you might think I introduced myself for the right reasons.”

“Connections?”

She nodded.

 _“We_ didn’t even have connections back then.”

“Then it’s a good thing I introduced myself because I thought you were cute, isn’t it?”

They both laughed.

“Can’t ever go wrong with that,” Harry agreed.

He got to know her as they played a series of Orpheum theaters in the upper midwest. She gave him a copy of her first album, a strange artifact called _Player Piano._ It was full of interesting songs masked with twee production, with overly glossy vocals. They didn’t quite shine until she sanded them down and presented them live.

“I’ve got a lot of ideas for my second album,” she told him. “For the way it’s produced, I mean. There are some players I’ve got in mind to really get that, you know… I want to make a record the way Van Morrison makes a record, that stream of consciousness thing, live to tape.”

He learned that she hated doing press almost as much as Zayn, but with better reasons.

“I’m tired of being asked what it’s like to be a woman in rock, you know?”

She had a strange accent, a hybrid of the American south and the California coast where she’d been living. The more Harry listened to her speak, the more he wanted to. 

“Listen,” he said to her one night after a show. “Feel free to tell me to piss off, but d’you think you’d like to have dinner with me some night?”

“You hang around my crew every night and you’re only just asking permission?” She was going to make him come out and say it. She was marvelously bold sometimes.

“You know what I mean, Taylor,” he said, and then, because it seemed important, “I don’t want to take advantage when we’re working together but I’m having a really lovely time getting to know you. So it’s your call.”

She’d looked around the green room, like she was about to cross a street, and then smiled.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Just don’t - I mean, this time I’m not just some girl who came up to you because you’re cute, alright? I’m not gonna let my career be defined by sleeping with you.”

Harry laughed. “I’ll take the bullet - let them write articles about Taylor Swift’s latest conquest, I can handle it.”

They ended up getting dinner together at a candlelit restaurant down the road from Cobo Hall in Detroit, two glasses of vespolina breathing on the table between them.

When Harry kissed her she tasted like the wine and her lipstick, and she smelled like bergamot and clean sweat. He held her and kissed her, winding a hand into her wild blonde curls and cradling the back of her head.

They pulled away from one another gradually, Harry nosing close to her until she opened her eyes, vivid and cornflower blue. He pressed down any persistent memory of holding Niall like this.

He’d never held Niall like this, not really - not out in the open where anyone might see them. He’d never taken Niall’s hand the way he was doing now with Taylor and walked down the street with him. She grinned at him, unguarded and sweet, her cupid’s bow mouth appealingly kiss-smudged.

“Come back to mine,” Harry said, swinging their clasped hands between them. “If you want.”

“Maybe _you_ should come back to _mine,”_ Taylor countered, laughing.

Her gauzy dress whirled around her as she turned to face him. Her smile was addictive - Harry couldn’t stop wanting to see more of it, to be the cause of it.

“Could do, could do,” he said, and reeled her in by her wrist before catching her around the waist and kissing her again.

They were nearly back at their hotel, one entire floor rented out like they were properly famous. Their buses and vans were parked in the lot across the street.

“Seriously, though,” Harry said, striding into the hotel lobby with Taylor just beside him. “I don’t want this to end.”

She smirked at him, the place where her lipstick had smeared quirking up, and raised her eyebrows. “Seriously, though,” she said. “Come up to my room.” She leaned forward and kissed him again, softly.

Harry turned toward the bank of elevators just in time to see a pair of doors sliding shut and Niall just behind them, looking dispassionately at Harry and Taylor.

_Fuck._

 

-

 

Niall fled to Zayn’s room. It was the only place he could think to go; his own room, with his own things, was still imbued with Harry’s presence: the shirt Harry had bought him in Kensington Market during their first proper trip to London; the beautiful capo Harry had given him for Christmas hooked to the headstock of his Gretsch. Everything he owned had a memory attached, and it was a comfort, often, to carry around his history with him like this, but now… He wanted to be somewhere entirely decontextualized from the rest of his life.

Zayn was his best option.

“It’s open,” Zayn called from the other side of the door when Niall knocked. His room was lit in a strange, heavy red light: he had scarves draped over his lamps, and was delicately pinching a joint between his thumb and forefinger, its tip glowing when he inhaled. Niall closed the door behind him and Zayn raised his eyebrows as if to say, _that bad?_

“I hope you don’t mind,” Niall said, settling carefully onto the bed across from Zayn. It was a California king, plenty of space. “I don’t - I didn’t really fancy being alone, tonight.”

“You saw Haz with Taylor?”

Niall just looked at him. Zayn was sharper than anyone really gave him credit for - of course he would’ve twigged to it immediately.

“Here,” Zayn said, offering the rest of the joint.

Niall took it and dragged deeply.

Being in Zayn’s level presence always seemed to ground him. Zayn was by miles the most emotionally intelligent member of the band - where Liam and Louis were both apt to accidentally hurt feelings, usually one another’s, and then over or under-apologize, or where Harry could be distant to the point of coldness, Zayn seemed to perfectly understand the feelings at hand and treat them in kind. He busied himself rolling another joint and took a long drag before passing it to Niall.

“Can I ask you a stupid question?” Niall said after a time. The room - its dim, harlequin light and opulent furnishings - pulsed subtly around him.

“Go for it,” Zayn said, taking the joint back from Niall and holding it to his lips.

“Have you ever been in love?”

The moment he said it, Niall knew it was too invasive. He’d never known Zayn to have a _relationship,_ and neither Liam nor Louis, Zayn’s chief confidantes, had ever alluded to a girlfriend. None of Zayn’s songs concerned themselves with romantic love, either: he wrote about his family, about his friends from home, and the ways their lives had diverged. He wrote about history, and fame, and solitude. He would never have written “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” He would never have given so much of himself away for free.

“No,” Zayn said. “And yes, I guess. But not like you mean it.”

“How do I mean it?”

“Like how you are with Harry.” He said it in his flat Yorkshire accent, vowels all running into one another, like it was an easy thing to talk about out loud. Niall took the joint back from him and smoked it down to the roach end.

“So how do you mean it?” he asked, finally. “You don’t have to tell me, but I’m, you know, interested.”

Zayn stretched his hand out in front of him and examined the spaces between his spread fingers: the lines of his knuckles; the way the rust-colored light illuminated his fingertips and cast the back of his hand in shadow.

“I like to be alone,” Zayn said after a long time, and Niall was starting to wonder if that was his cue to leave when he continued. “But I don’t much care for being lonely. I guess I fall in love a little bit with everyone I care about.”

“So, like, Ed?” They’d been close, briefly. Niall knew this. He wasn’t following the conversation very well, be it because of the weed or because Zayn wasn’t making sense, he couldn’t say.

“Ed, yeah,” Zayn said. “For a while. We wrote music together, no purer love than that.”

“Liam and Louis?”

Zayn smiled, and it seemed to light his face from within. “My best friends. Of course I’m in love with them. They’re so - it was weird, right, because Liam joined a group of mine first, but I met them at the same time, and like… I can’t even imagine my life with one and not the other, even though it started out that way.”

“Really?” Niall asked. He’d slid all the way down the bed so he was staring up at the ceiling, one corner of Zayn’s perfectly coiffed hair just at the corner of his field of vision.

“Yeah, like, Liam used to be so shy. If you’d have told me then that he plays every show without a shirt now I’d never have believed you. With Louis it’s different, it’s like… he used to be really reckless.”

“He’s still really reckless,” Niall said. “On my way here I saw him breaking into the hotel kitchen with an empty shopping bag.”

“Nah, that’s just laughs,” Zayn said. “He used to… Not care what happened to him, you know? We brought that out in each other, for a bit. Think Liam tempered us both some.”

Niall nodded.

“So you’re just in love with everyone,” he said.

Zayn shrugged, unbothered. “Not a bad problem to have, all things considered. Which one of us is pining after somebody right now?”

That was fair. Niall turned onto his side.

“What about me? And Harry?”

“You and Harry should talk about you and Harry,” Zayn said, scraping his packet of rolling papers up off the bedside table and fiddling with them. “D’you want another?”

“Nah, but you go on,” Niall said. “And that’s not what I meant.”

Zayn was crumbling weed into the crease of the paper, but he nodded his head for Niall to continue.

“Been in the band basically a year now,” Niall said. “You fallen in love yet?”

Zayn shrugged. “It’s a pretty low barrier for entry, mate,” he said. “But when we all wrote Horse Fever together? When you and I wrote Gathering Light? Yeah, Niall, that’s love.” 

Niall could hear Zayn settling further back into the pillows, could hear the rasp of his lighter. Smoke drifted through the air above them. It seemed desperately unfair, that Zayn should be so easily satisfied, so able to take and create the love he needed. That he was such an island, so while he took genuine pleasure in the company of others, he didn’t seem to _need_ it like Niall did. Zayn was a self-sustaining system. Niall was a desert in search of rain.

“Can I ask you another stupid question,” he said.

“By all means,” Zayn said magnanimously. His hand found Niall’s on the bedspread and transferred the joint to his fingers, and Niall took a drag before asking.

“You - sorry - you _do_ have sex, right?”

Zayn’s sputter of laughter, unexpected and gratifying, pierced the strange atmosphere, and Niall shook himself, and laughed, too.

“Yeah, Niall, I have sex,” he said. “Why, you shopping for a rebound?”

“I probably should be,” Niall said. “Right? Isn’t that how you’re supposed to get over somebody?”

“I reckon it just takes time,” Zayn said. He shuffled around on the bedclothes, trying to get comfortable. “No need to rush yourself.”

But there was, wasn’t there? If Harry was moving on, it couldn’t be healthy for Niall to be taking his time letting the relationship go. The _relationship,_ as if they’d ever put a name to what they’d had together. They’d never named their band, and they’d never said to one another, _we’re boyfriends. We’re lovers. We’re partners._ Any of the usual terms which would’ve given Niall some frame of reference.

“It just feels like,” Niall started. It seemed too big a thing to say out loud, to Zayn, of all people. “Harry’s the only man I’ve ever been with, you know. He was the first person who knew I was. What I am.” He swallowed. “The first person to know that I’m gay.”

It was too warm in the room, suddenly. Niall pulled at the collar of his shirt. He hadn’t said it out loud, had he? Admitted it, in so many words? To _Zayn?_

“Ah,” Zayn said. “Then it’ll take… more time, I guess.”

Helpful.

“It’s just - what if he’s the only man I ever feel - god, sorry - like, _safe enough_ with to say that to? What if he’s my last shot at ever having, you know, being in love?”

“You said it to me,” Zayn pointed out. “You’ve never told me you’re gay before.”

“But you knew.” Niall could feel himself starting to panic. The mellow vibe of the weed had gone, and now he was being pinned in place under a spiral of his own paranoid thoughts. Hearing Zayn say the words back to him had ratcheted his heart rate up by half. There was no taking it back now.

Zayn’s hand found his wrist, then his fingers, and clasped them. He lay there, smoking, holding Niall’s hand while Niall quietly had a panic attack. Niall felt the wave of nausea crest in him and swallowed it down, took several calming breaths, and squeezed Zayn’s fingers.

“You’re good,” Zayn said, in his thick, treacly voice.

The room was warm.

“Zayn,” he said. He was aware, in that moment of perfect, logicless clarity afforded only to the  very stoned, that Harry was having sex with Taylor right now. He blinked. He felt reckless, an entire world spreading out at his feet, all his careful plans and lists and expectations dashed on the pavement outside. “Zayn, will you kiss me?”

It wouldn’t matter if Zayn said no, because Niall had nothing left to lose. It wouldn’t matter if he said yes, because nothing mattered much, just then. Because Zayn was in love with everyone in his queer, distant way, and Niall wanted nothing more than to feel loved, to feel valued. To be reassured that no matter what happened with Harry, he could still be kissed by a beautiful, kind man somewhere in rural America.

Niall didn’t need to be romanced. He needed to be treated with compassion.

Zayn leaned up on one arm so he was poised over Niall on the bed. He really was beautiful. His hair fell into his face, and he tucked it back behind his ear with his free hand. In the muted light Zayn’s big, dark eyes seemed almost illuminated from within, they were so warm. He lowered his dramatic fringe of eyelashes, bent, and kissed Niall.

Niall’s pulse roared in his ears. He leaned up, getting his arm around Zayn’s waist and pulling him closer. The weed had made him dry-mouthed, but his opened his lips against Zayn’s anyway. He was so tired of longing - for success, for comfort, for Harry - and he just wanted to _have._

Zayn pulled Niall in, one hand gentle on the back of his neck, and tumbled them both down onto the bedspread, so that they were crowded in on all sides by the pillows, the rumpled duvet. Niall kissed Zayn with everything he had in him. They held one another tenderly, the way married couples do.

“Babe,” Zayn said against Niall’s mouth. He pulled back, but when Niall opened his eyes, Zayn was still close enough that he blurred around the edges. Niall stroked his hip over his shirt.

“Sorry,” Niall said softly. “I don’t - “

“I’m gonna get some water,” Zayn said. He smiled, and it lit his whole face. “Don’t move.”

Niall lay perfectly still, listening to the boast of his heart in his chest, where it continued to beat, despite it all. He could hear Zayn filling a glass under the tap in the en suite, and then the soft shuffle of his feet on the carpet, and then the mattress dipped and Zayn was back in front of him, offering him the glass. Niall drank it all.

“Are you alright?” Zayn asked.

Niall nodded. The world continued to turn. Outside, cicadas shrilled into the gathering dusk. “I _am_ sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have made you -”

Zayn blinked. “You didn’t make me do anything,” he said. “I liked kissing you. It’s not like I thought it was going to solve all your problems, or anything. Just seemed like it might be… Nice, like.”

 _Nice._ It _had_ been nice, though. Niall wanted to run his fingertips over his own lips, to feel if they’d changed. If he could feel Harry lingering on them, or if Zayn had kissed away any remnants that may yet be left.

“You’re a good friend,” Niall said, looking down at the bedspread. With a foot of space between them, and his mind clearing, it seemed silly: he’d thought he’d feel entirely different afterwards. It was just Zayn.

“Not that good a friend,” Zayn said. He slid back down into the mess of pillows. “I’m in love with you, remember?”

Niall laughed, and settled down beside Zayn, warm and comfortable. Harry had moved on, and Niall… hadn’t, but it didn’t seem like such an impossibility, now.

“I didn’t even know you were… Like, with men, I mean.”

Zayn shrugged, and Niall felt the movement shift the duvet between them. “I don’t think of myself as anything, really. It’s more about a person, for me. A connection, like.”

“Oh,” Niall said. He’d spent so much of his life resisting connecting with anyone, because it never felt like he was doing it in the right way. Zayn made it sound so simple. “I get that.”

Zayn put his cool hand on Niall’s chest, so that his fingertips rested against the exposed skin above Niall’s shirt collar. The moment hung between them like a question.

Niall put his hand over Zayn’s and shifted it just so, so that the column of buttons on Niall’s shirt fell just under his palm. _Yes,_ he wanted to say. _I want to be close to you._

Zayn blinked slowly at him, his amber eyes liquid in the dim light. His hand closed in the front of Niall’s shirt. They kissed slowly, then less slowly, as the night outside grew quiet.

Niall woke to the inky spill of Zayn’s hair on the pillow beside him. He breathed in deep. He wasn’t hungover, hadn’t been drunk. He was exhausted, though, felt the aftershocks of an emotional bender ringing through him. He pulled the duvet up over his head.

He and Zayn had kissed. Were they going to be people who kissed one another, now? Niall didn’t think he’d be able to handle it if all of a sudden Zayn was giving him a kiss hello and goodbye at rehearsals. What would Harry think?

He didn’t bother dealing with the fact that they’d done more than kiss. It seemed too alien a shape to comprehend in the pale light of morning. Beside him in bed, Zayn turned onto his side. Under the duvet Niall could see the vague outline of his body, sculpted and naked. He remembered how it had felt, pressed against him last night. How good Zayn had made him feel; how worthwhile. The feeling hadn’t lingered, but the memory of it wasn’t so sharp that it hurt to hold. Niall could acknowledge that it had been nice, in the moment, to be wanted by someone he admired so much.

“Babe,” Zayn mumbled into the pillow. “I can _feel_ you overthinking this.”

Niall turned over to face him and found himself being folded into Zayn’s wiry arms.

“I miss him,” he said into the dip of Zayn’s throat, feeling like an absolute shit for it. To have spent the night with Zayn and still be talking about Harry afterwards. “I’m always missing him.”

Zayn stroked his hair and held him until they both fell back asleep, and then woke up again, cotton-mouthed and out of sorts. They packed their bags together and were back on the road by noon, Harry languishing with a hangover in his bunk, Niall avoiding him anyway.

 

-

 

The crowd went wild.

In some twist of irony, the weeks since Harry started sleeping with Taylor had charged the air onstage, made him and Niall more reckless with one another. Harry sauntered over and bared his teeth into Niall’s exposed neck, got a fistful of his hair and dragged his head back as he played.

Harry felt it keenly: before, the avenues of possibility had spilled out between them like exits from a roundabout. Now, they were finally standing still. It was terrible to think Niall was finally able to be _present_ with him, _immediate_ in a way he hadn’t been when they were together, when he’d always had his dark eyes trained on the horizon.

Harry raised his mic between them and the cable smacked the bridge of Niall’s Gretsch, sending a squeal of feedback through the amps. They hollered the last chorus of “Horse Fever” into each other’s faces, sweaty and spitting and never close enough.

Offstage, Taylor was waiting, her eyes bright and the red slash of her smile drifting to one side as she eyed him up. She made Harry feel so helplessly wanted. He put Niall out of his mind and fell to her, kissing her, putting a hand on the gentle curve of her waist over her jacket. Her crew was small and they could all squeeze into a rented utility van, with Taylor driving and Harry sitting up front, holding her hand over the gear shift.

It was later, as they were laying in bed at the hotel and Harry was studying the contours of her back under the bed sheet, that he realized he may really _like_ her. She was beautiful, of course, but she was smart about her career, and unselfconsciously weird, and she liked the same sorts of obtuse American novels he did. She’d loaned him a book he’d not been able to put down, an experimental stream-of-consciousness type story about a union strike in a lumber town out west, and the margins were filled with her cramped little notes and emphases.

The first night they’d spent together he’d read _Howl_ aloud to her, beginning to end, even though it was late when they started and they would, neither of them, get enough sleep to be comfortable. It was an urge he felt only with special people, to share with them, to hold them close in the same breath as he held the art that meant the most to him.

She treated him like an artist and a person at the same time. It wasn’t an ability he’d seen much evidence of, in most of the people he’d met since the band had picked up.

The tour ground forward, and Harry continued to lose himself in thrall to the music with Niall, and to rejoin Taylor and feel healed for it.

By the time they made it to Los Angeles, they were all anybody would ask about.

“You’ve recently started dating your tourmate Taylor Swift,” another nameless journalist would ask him, ignoring the rest of the band entirely, and Harry would nod and smile and say, “She’s a wonderful up-and-coming artist, I’m very lucky to be spending time with her.”

After the last concert of the American leg of their tour, Harry went back to Taylor’s Santa Monica beach house and made love to her, and didn’t want to let her go. The thought of leaving a love so simple made him exhausted all over. Taylor never made him feel like he was a burden to love; Taylor never kissed him and tasted like sadness.

“Let’s buy a house,” he said, pressing his mouth against her hair. “I’ve got the money.” And it was true, he did. The album and the tour had brought them the success and resources that he and Niall had never had as a duo.

“Why rush?” Taylor asked. She blinked up at him in the twilight, her eyelashes a smudgy shadow, hard to read. “Come back when your tour’s done, I’ll be here recording.”

“I don’t want to come back and keep doing this,” Harry said, and he knew he sounded like a child, was well aware that Taylor was a couple of years older than him and already outpaced him in practicality.

“Then -”

“I mean I want to come back and _be_ with you,” Harry said. He gathered her up and held her, because she would let him.

Taylor frowned at him. “Okay,” she said doubtfully.

He kissed her, and kissed her, until she looked more sure. Until he felt it.

On their last day in Los Angeles he let a realtor drive him up to Laurel Canyon and put a down payment on a house. The lawn around the front porch was frosted with clusters of primroses, and the sun broke through the canopy of trees and glittered off the ocean, just visible in the distance.

Harry closed his eyes and breathed in deep.

 

_October 1973, Australia_

 

Selfishly, Niall liked having Harry here, even if they weren’t talking much. He liked to see the edges of the wound.

He’d never been to Australia before, but he had family, cousins emigrated from Ireland, scattered all over out here. Bobby’d been after him to go around visiting, saying hello and everything. Bobby’d been trying to keep Niall updated on what he called “the situation” by the border, how Ireland was hemorrhaging citizens, how unsafe Niall’s cousins felt trying to walk around in Dublin.

“Da, I’ve got to go,” Niall said into the phone. The time difference was crazy, late afternoon in Mullingar and early as he could get up in Sydney. “This call’s costin’ me a fortune.”

“Go, go,” Bobby said. “Love you. Send my love to Harry and the boys.”

“I will.”

Niall pulled at the collar of his jumper and hung up the phone. Where fall was already waning towards winter back home, Australia was only beginning to warm up. Between the five of them nobody had quite managed to pack for the weather, and they were sharing around a mess of mismatched layers, all trying to be warm enough but not too hot.

The shirt he had on was an old one of Harry’s that had gotten too tight in the shoulder. It smelled faintly like him, of sandalwood and soap.

They had ten days left of dates for the year and then they’d be home and Niall would be able to sit still for long enough to sort himself out.

There was a gentle knock at the door and then Zayn came looking like he’d just woken up. It was barely noon and they were all horribly jet-lagged; he probably _had_ just woken up.

“Can I -” Zayn interrupted himself with an enormous yawn. “Can I sleep in here for a bit?”

Niall moved aside and patted the bed next to him, and Zayn fell face first onto it.

“Louis has the telly all the way up in the room next to me,” he said, muffled by the pillows. “It’s quieter over here.” He reached blindly for Niall, grabbing first his thigh, then his elbow, then dragging fingers down to hold Niall’s hand. “And I missed you,” he said, still with his eyes closed. Half asleep.

This thing they were doing wasn’t exactly new anymore, but it still thrilled him, when Zayn said things like that. It was strange to be so casually wanted; everything with Harry had been so built up, so dire. Zayn was refreshingly unbothered by things like “what Niall might eventually want out of a relationship” or “what exactly they were doing,” and Niall tried to follow his example.

And it was nice, honestly. It was still nice. Zayn’s companionship wasn’t all-consuming, but it wasn’t one-dimensional either. They had become closer friends, they cared about one another.

Niall slid down in the bed to lay beside him. He had fallen asleep already, the kohl-dark fringe of his eyelashes striking against the bed linens. It was warm in the bed, Zayn radiating heat all alongside him. Niall struggled out of his jumper and tossed it across the room in the general direction of his suitcase, then rolled closer to Zayn and held him, breathing him in.

Once they’d all more or less found some equilibrium from the jet lag, the Australian shows were actually alright. They’d been on the road so long that their playing was tight and effortless, and if any of them were flagging, missing home, the energy of the audiences brought them back into it. Their support act was an Australian jam band who drew a large local crowd, and they became rowdier and wilder as the night went on.

Nearly as soon as they’d arrived, they were leaving again, finishing out the tour with two dates in Japan.

Niall was shocked at the size of the crowds that’d turned out for them. There were young women in the front row singing his lyrics back to him in his own language, people in homemade Navigator t-shirts, people with newly translated issues of month-old Melody Makers they waved at him to sign. It was a heady rush. The five of them stuck close together walking around, all their hard-earned social capital washed away as they stared in wide-eyed wonder down Tokyo’s brilliantly lit streets.

“You almost hate to leave,” Liam said, peering out the window of the car they’d hired to get them to the airport after their last show. “I never get recognized back home.” 

“That was then, Payno,” Louis told him, dragging him into a gentle headlock. “If you paid attention when the label called you’d know, the record’s still charting. We’ll be coming back to proper success.”

It was hard not to feel optimistic, when Louis said it like that.

Niall looked across the car to where Harry was gazing out the window at nothing, his chin in his hand. He’d been quieter since they’d left America. His beautiful hair was badly in need of a trim, the ends frizzing around his shoulders like he was permanently caught in a small static field.

“You alright?” Niall asked Harry later, as they were all wandering the concourse trying to find the gate for their flight home. They were in a smaller private terminal, full of suit-wearing business moguls, nobody who would stop them for autographs.

“I am, yeah,” Harry said distantly.

Niall felt bad, for a moment, that they’d both had flings on tour but Niall had been allowed to continue his. That Harry’d been left alone these last couple of weeks, would be flying back to England with them alone.

“I think this is us,” he said, pointing to a nearly-empty gate. His Japanese was terrible but there was a helpful translation in small print on the sign that he could just read if he squinted.

Harry didn’t say anything, and when Niall looked at him he seemed distinctly uncomfortable.

“About that, Nialler,” he said. “We’ve got all this time off now and I’m actually, I’ve had the label book me on a flight to Los Angeles. I’ve got a house there now.”

Niall received the information as if from a distance. He folded it carefully and looked at Harry and did his best to smile, to support him. To remind himself that he had no high ground, carrying on like he was with Zayn.

“Oh,” he said, supportively. “That’s good.”

“I’ll be back in a few months when writing sessions start back up, I’ve just got like… I have my own things, you know?”

Niall needed a tall glass of something dangerous. He patted Harry clumsily on the shoulder and turned to see if he could find the airport bar, and ran into Liam a dozen yards away wanting the same thing. By the time they’d had a couple of rounds and returned to the gate Harry was already gone.

 

_Winter 1973-74, England_

 

Niall went home for Christmas, of course. It helped bolster him through the couple of weeks immediately after tour - seeing Bressie and Eoghan and his other friends from home, spending time with Bobby. It was healing, and not. Everything in Ireland was something he’d shared with Harry, somehow. After Christmas he took the long ferry alone back to England, his Morris Minor complaining all the way down from Liverpool.

In London, Niall circumvented his own empty flat to stay at Zayn’s. It wasn’t a crutch, exactly, but it made it easier, being in the warm radius of Zayn’s home life. His family was always in and out, and Liam and Louis were over often, cracking jokes, up to no good, reminding Niall that people could be in a band and could be friends, as well, as a separate thing. He spent nights cuddled up against Zayn’s bony chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. In the mornings, bleary-eyed and hungover, they made eggs and potatoes huddled together over the stove, and Zayn kissed the junction of Niall’s neck and shoulder, and neither of them worried who of Zayn’s entourage was around and might see them, because Zayn’s home was a place they’d both be safe, regardless.

Niall knew it was a childish thing, substituting one long relationship with another. He knew it was a tourniquet that would not hold, in the long term. He kissed Zayn’s soft, parted lips in the dim light of the bedroom they shared, and they made love, and it was never enough. What he found himself wanting, in the afterglow of Zayn’s beautiful, talented body, was to be able to love him. At least to tell him how badly he wanted to love him, and how grateful he was for what Zayn was willing to give him. 

He practiced the words in the mirror. They didn’t come out sounding flattering.

At the end of an overlong January, Zayn was slated to do a short club tour. He’d told Niall up front when he’d accepted the offer: he would be accompanying Harry on some new material.

“It’s just a few club shows,” he said, stirring a pot of soup on the stove. The cold outside had hemmed them in all weekend, neither of them bothering to put on real clothes, turning all the radiators up because they could afford to be comfortable. It seemed awfully indulgent.

“Of course,” Niall said. He was proud of how casual he was able to sound. Harry was writing new material, without him, not expressly for the band. That was fine, honestly. It was good he was keeping busy.

“I hate to have too much, y’know, time offstage,” Zayn said. “Tours drive me crazy but I’m always afraid I’ll forget how to play, like.”

Niall supposed he understood. He’d never seen Zayn practice playing, outside of the rehearsals and writing sessions they had together as a group. He had an incredible ear, and years of piano lessons as a child had ingrained all the fingerings he could want at the ready in his muscle memory, but he was lazy without the motivation of a performance. He liked his time off to be _off,_ reacquainting himself with his friends, eating well, sleeping late.

Niall still played guitar almost every day. Where Zayn found sitting at the piano without an explicit purpose to be a tax on his free time, to Niall, playing by himself was the closest he felt he could come to being calm during their off time. It reminded him why he’d started playing in the first place: because he’d loved to, was all.

It was strange to be reminded that Harry was of the same mind, to a certain extent. That when he and Niall had met, he’d not been much of a musician, but had been a prolific lyricist already. He loved words the way Niall loved melody. It set off an aching in him, to know they were going through these motions without one another.

He wondered, in his weaker moments, if Taylor was helping him with the music. If she was teaching him banjo rolls and note-perfect fingerstyle guitar out there in Los Angeles.

If they were on the precipice of their own two-surname folk duo, clichés be damned.

“You should come out when we play here,” Zayn said. He moved around the kitchen island to rub Niall’s shoulders. Zayn’s easy physical affection was at once so comforting and so unsettling - Niall never knew if he wanted to lean into it or shrink away. He wondered if he would ever be able to touch another person with ease, with confidence.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m sure Harry misses you,” Zayn said, his hands stilling on Niall’s shoulders. “You’d do well to catch up.”

“Right,” Niall said shortly.

It was hard not to feel like Zayn was butting in where he didn’t belong. Niall knew he was being unfair - he and Zayn were _involved,_ to some nebulous extent, and Zayn was certainly allowed to have an opinion on this sort of thing, because of that, and because of the band. What’s more, he was sure Zayn wasn’t acting out of any self interest. He knew Niall and Harry both well. His suggestion was gentle and sensible.

But in his guilty mind Niall couldn’t help but pit Harry and Zayn against one another. He imagined things they could both want from him, things he was entirely unable or unwilling to give. As much as he wished he could love Zayn, he also privately wanted Zayn to love him, regardless. To feel about him the way he felt about Harry. It was awful, but it would be such a reassurance, to be so recklessly loved.

“Sure,” he said, finally. “I mean, you know I love to watch you play.”

Zayn grinned at him, and Niall leaned up to kiss him, hard. He was always having to toe the line with Zayn, to make sure he was entirely in control of himself, of their relationship. Their domesticity had tugged at his grip for weeks, him finding himself inexplicably drawn to sappy thoughts about growing old with Zayn, about marrying him, a hilarious impossibility. It wasn’t what he really wanted, at any rate. What Niall wanted was to be folded into the certainty of somebody else’s future, anybody who’d have him. Zayn deserved more than that, at least.

Niall would never grow old with anyone.

 

_January 1974, Nevada_

 

In the winter, the desert became a sort of blasted moonscape. There was nothing like it in England. Harry wanted to capture the colors, the cool-toned reds and browns, the shape of the palisades and striated cliffs and dunes. The romantic shape of a cactus with one arm raised in greeting. Taylor had already indulged him three times when he’d wanted to pull over and take photographs, pulling her coat around herself, halfway smiling when he turned the lens of his Polaroid on her.

“Stand next to the cactus,” he’d said, and she’d gamely done so, the robin’s egg blue of her coat an exclamation point amongst the muted hues of the desert. She’d turned her head, watching him as he’d circled around behind her to get the shot. “Stop looking at me,” he’d said, laughing.

The photo had come out lovely. Taylor and the cactus stood to the left of the frame, and out beyond them was the vast, blurred expanse of the desert, bisected by the highway. Scrub grass and juniper and a low-hanging sky. He’d snuck up behind her after taking it and wrapped his arms around her, craning his neck so he could give her a kiss.

The trip was Harry’s idea. The floors in the house he’d bought in LA were being refinished and neither of them felt much like waiting around. Besides, the lull after Christmas had left them both antsy and aimlessly creative - Taylor had been messing around with alternate guitar tunings for hours at a time just for some outlet to all her restless energy, and Harry had a journal full of bulleted lists, lyrics, thoughts, anything. So they’d rented a sensible sedan and planned to drive to Vail over two or three days, and stay there for a while, a week or two, and work.

He was doing a few shows by himself at the end of January - or, not _by himself,_ exactly, Zayn had agreed to come play the piano for him, but the gigs were billed under his name - and he wanted to have new songs to play. Non-Navigator songs.

Non-Niall songs.

Of the two of them, Taylor was the better driver, but she liked to do it less. To Harry, the novelty still hadn’t worn off. Two summers before, in the driver’s seat of Niall’s Morris Minor, stalling over and over on the road into town while Niall patiently told him again how to shift from first gear to second; Niall putting his hand over Harry’s on the gear shift, both of them sweaty from the summer heat; how their little bubble of togetherness had scaffolded everything they’d done, back then. Niall had taught him to drive while they worked on their album, and it might’ve been… Harry couldn’t say, exactly, but sitting behind the wheel of an American car, with everything that had happened between then and now, he thought that the first half of that summer might’ve been the last truly happy, uncomplicated time they’d spent together.

When nothing much mattered but the music and the synchronicity of the way they’d loved each other.

Harry looked over at Taylor, her slender legs drawn up in the passenger’s seat, a pen dangling loosely in her slack hand. She was mostly asleep, her pale eyelashes soft against her cheeks. Without lipstick, the cupid’s bow of her lips was soft and delicate, more tempting. She was beautiful, of course she was beautiful, but she was smart and challenging, as well. When they’d met the second time Harry had been bowled over by how unimpressed with him she’d been. How she’d outgrown seeking his attention, and in doing so, made him desperate for hers. Even before they’d properly started dating she’d said to him, in no uncertain terms, that she wouldn’t compromise her career for him. That she was an artist first, and one deserving of respect. She wouldn’t be known as Harry Styles’ girlfriend, or _groupie,_ or whatever.

Probably, he’d begun loving her then. Harry always fell for the people who made him want to work.

The next filling station was still a ways ahead, and Harry adjusted his grip on the wheel. The yawning January sky was beginning to darken. On the other side of the cab Taylor tucked her face in against her knees, folded up against the worsening cold.

Harry stopped to fill the tank with petrol. At the service counter, the teenager who accepted his cash asked him to sign the Rolling Stone cover Navigator had shot a couple of months ago, which had only just come out, and he did.

“Are we stopping for the night?” Taylor asked him sleepily when he got back into the driver’s seat beside her.

“Not yet,” he said. “Probably at the next town.”

He leaned over and kissed her fringe, then her cheek, then her sleepy mouth.

“Okay,” she said. “You want me to drive? You’ve been going all day.”

Harry shrugged. “I’m alright for a bit longer. You sleep, I’ll wake you up when I find us a hotel.”

The pale, moonlit expanse of the desert stretched out on either side of them. Harry had never felt so small, so much like a tiny piece of the vast machinery that sustained the planet. The moon was bright above them, and the stars… Harry had scarcely seen so many. The first time he’d visited Mullingar with Niall they’d lain out in one of the open fields, surrounded by the soft sounds of cows lowing and night birds calling and the breeze coming in off the hills. Harry had been cold, then, bundled into a coat but with the damp grass seeping into his jeans, making him shiver.

Niall had lain beside him and pointed out all the constellations he could name. He was so good at that, so sharp and particular about those sorts of things. He’d stayed up to watch the moon landing a couple of years before, and had kept a cheap telescope in his bedroom as a teenager. Harry had always been privately amused by the way someone so grounded could be such a romantic about space.

The two of them talked and traced the constellations with the tips of their outstretched fingers, and Harry had breathed deeply, the crisp, cold air and the loamy, verdant smell of the place where Niall had come from.

Harry blinked. He’d drifted onto the rumblestrip, and he steered deftly off it again. There was a town a few miles away where they could stop and get a room. If he was getting lost in thought like this, they should probably stop as soon as they could, just to be safe.

Still, it was strange, how he could be here, could be traveling with a woman he admired so much, whose company he so enjoyed, yet he couldn’t shake these memories. His life with Niall, the way he’d lived it, was over, but it seemed to exist just out of phase with the linear concept of time. He could be standing in line at the grocery store in Silver Lake and he would be, without warning, falling down into a memory of buying potatoes and onions at the market with Niall to make soup, when they were so desperately poor after the release of their album together. He would be working on a song in his drawing room, a guitar in his lap, and there Niall would be, a spectre coming into his painting studio with a notebook and a Joan Baez import under his arm.

When you have loved, when you have been loved, so deeply you know it in the marrow of your bones, it can never quite be dismissed as something that has happened to you. It’s something that you _are,_ some fundamental truth of you, and it is always with you, or just in the next room, waiting to remind you how you came to be this way.

And if you’ve let it go, or lost it, or allowed it to wither… It can come back hurt, or petulant, or angry.

Just before they left Devon Harry had overheard Niall speaking to Zayn, the two of them sharing whisky on the portico while the sun set over the surrounding pastures.

“It wasn’t built to last,” Niall had been saying, and Harry’d known without thinking that they were speaking about him. “It wasn’t built at all, it just happened.”

“Love is a curious thing,” Zayn had replied. He was drunk, but the effusive, charming sort of drunk that Zayn tended to get.

It wasn’t what Niall had wanted to hear, and they lapsed into silence, and Harry had kept walking. So no, he hadn’t been surprised when things had broken as easily as they’d come together. No wrenching conversation, no confessions of true love. The two of them and a Joni Mitchell record and the grim acknowledgement that whatever it was they’d had with each other, it wasn’t something they could sustain.

The rumblestrip shook Harry again, and he jerked the wheel to the left as he heard Taylor start to speak, groggy and annoyed. “Babe -”

He was aware of the car in motion, that the motion was wrong, somehow. He knew that before the sound registered, the screech of crumpling metal against metal, the wail of a horn. The soft moonlight blocked out by the yellow glare of a headlamp.

And then he was out of the car, something he must’ve done on purpose because the door was open behind him and he was standing in the middle of the highway, flooded by the glow of those oncoming headlamps. His sensible rented sedan was twisted around somebody else’s, and he was beginning to become aware of the fact that he was in pain.

“Taylor?” he tried to say, but he choked on her name and was left coughing. His chest hurt. It hurt to breathe deeply. “Taylor!” he tried again, stronger. He stumbled back to the car. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear anything. He crawled back into the cab and smelled petrol and the metallic scent of the steam rising from under the hood. He heard her whimper and panic gripped him.

Once, shortly after he and Niall had met, when they were still jamming around on folk songs on the weekends and getting to know one another, Harry had gotten laid up with the flu for a miserable eleven days. He’d been new to Dublin, and had very few friends. Even fewer who were easily reached and could drive. He’d called Niall at the record store and asked him for a lift to the clinic, and Niall had done it, and had brought him some beef stew besides.

That clinic had been small and white and busy, full of mums with their sniffling toddlers and grandmothers with achy hips, and Harry had waited for a long time to be seen, and Niall had waited with him, and driven him to the drugstore and then home afterwards.

Harry came to in the hospital with no recollection of when or how he’d gotten there. Everything was muffled and soft, white ceiling tiles and the faint click of a machine and no feeling at all. He must’ve been given morphine, a lot of morphine.

Harry floated in and out of consciousness. He couldn’t feel his arms and legs, couldn’t get a bearing on any part of his body. It felt as though he were a borderless mind, and if he could crack the method he would be able to send himself floating down the hall to a telephone, to call his mother or the record label, or to find Taylor.

_Taylor._

He tried to remember getting her out of the car. He must’ve done - he’d gone back in for her. She’d been breathing, had been in pain and made it known. Where was she? Was she alright? How had they gotten here - was she here at all?

Harry felt sick trying to remember how badly she’d been hurt. If he’d ever found out. He wrenched himself up and a dull throb of pain shot through his arm to his shoulder as he leaned over the side of the bed, vomiting something thin and insubstantial into the trash can.

“Oh, honey,” said a voice from the doorway. It was a nurse with a clipboard in her right hand and a cigarette in her left, and as she busied herself easing him back down and wiping the sick off his lips he was able to take stock, finally, of his body.

There was something very wrong with his arm. It was in a heavy plaster cast that came up over his elbow. Pain thudded through it when he tried to move it. His chest hurt, both broadly and acutely. He took several experimental breaths of varying depths and let them whoosh out of him, wincing in pain.

“Don’t do that,” the nurse said, flipping through his chart. “You have two broken ribs, you’ll want to go slow.”

The scent of her cigarette made him want one desperately, made him wonder where his things were. If they’d recovered his bag from the car. The car.

“Do you know -” he started, then had to take several slow breaths. “Did a girl come in with me? From the same accident?”

The nurse raised her eyebrows. “She’s not dead, don’t worry,” she said. “But she’s a little worse off than you, so she’s not out of ICU yet.”

“Okay,” Harry said. There was a hollow needle in the bend of his exposed elbow, taped into place, running up to an IV bag full of something clear and cool. His arm felt too cold where the needle went in. He flexed his fingers and the tendons shifted around the needle and he decided not to do that again.

“You should sleep more, if you can,” the nurse said. She checked the IV bag and marked something off on the chart before putting a hand on his forehead. He did feel tired, now that she’d said it.

In the between-place between sleep and wakefulness, Harry wondered about Taylor. He could see her, blurred in his memory, pinched between the crumpled dash of the car and the passenger’s side door, a dark spatter of blood scabbed over the inside of the windshield. It didn’t seem like the sort of injury somebody could come back from.

He wondered if anybody knew. If a journalist had been privately informed by a less-than-ethical nurse, or the label rep on the emergency contact card in his wallet had been called, or if his mother was on her way. If anybody had told Niall.

Just as likely this anonymous hospital in the middle of the Nevada desert had no idea who he was, or who Taylor Swift was. They could be any couple in a car wreck. A pair of anonymous lovers whose luck hadn’t quite run out.

He wanted to see her. He opened his mouth to ask the nurse, but he was asleep before he could form the words.

 

-

 

Somebody had hired a car. Niall rode in the back, watching the pale ghost of himself reflected in the window. Somebody had hired a car, but he wasn’t sure who - someone from the label, maybe, or Zayn, who could be so unpredictably level-headed.

When he was showing Niall out of the house, car idling in the street, Zayn had asked, “Do you want me to come with you?” and Niall had just shaken his head. He regretted it now, alone with his thoughts.

In his late teens he’d gone through a recapitulation of faith: attending mass, reconnecting with his mother, trying to do right by the Catholic church. It hadn’t stuck. In retrospect it’d certainly had more to do with some last ditch effort to save himself, with certain things becoming undeniable to him.

One of the last times he’d gone, as his interest in absolution was losing ground to the notion that he may never be saved, he’d seen a sermon from a visiting American pastor. It hadn’t convinced him not to leave the church, but he had found it beautiful, at the time, and had remembered parts of it, written them down that night amongst lyrics he was beginning to polish, some of which would find a home on his first album, with Harry.

As he watched Harry’s sleeping face he repeated those lines as best he could remember them, that prayer which had so struck him, years ago. “My lord God, I do not know where I’m going,” he said. “Nor do I know myself. That I think I’m following your will doesn’t mean that I actually am.”

He thought about what he and Harry had created together: their music; the little home they’d had together in Dublin. The fundamental understanding of one another like Niall had never felt with anyone else. For whatever that was worth.

He thought about what the five of them had done so far. What they might yet do.

“I believe that my desire to please you does in fact please you, and I hope that I have that desire in all that I’m doing.”

He was talking to God. He could as easily have been talking to Harry, two years ago, when the still waters of their friendship had been muddied and Niall couldn’t - or wouldn’t - tell Harry exactly how he felt because it felt too enormous to give a name to, even to himself, so he had tried to show him. To love Harry willfully; to hope that Harry understood.

He studied Harry’s sleeping face. There was a wine-colored bruise splashed across the bridge of his nose where it had smacked into the steering wheel - a wonder it wasn’t broken, the doctor had said. Niall took Harry’s hand, cradling it carefully in both of his own. He kissed the abraded skin on Harry’s knuckles. He wanted badly, selfishly, to be comforted - wanted Harry to wake up and tell him everything was going to be alright. He looked fragile and transparent as a windowpane, every flaw, so human and ordinary, on display.

“If I do this,” Niall said, his mouth pressed to the back of Harry’s hand. “You will lead me by the right road, and I will know nothing of it. Though I seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

He began to cry then, like a child cries, his face crumpling and his body bowing over, wracked with grief. He clutched Harry’s hand and wept until his mouth went dry and his breaths, shuddering in and out of him, slowed.

“Niall.”

Niall looked up. Harry’s eyes, swollen from the bruise across his face, were slitted open, vivid and green, all the greener for the purple of the bruise.

“Oh, Harry.” It was all he could think to say. “Look at you.”

Harry shifted on the bed and grimaced, his whole lanky body a minefield of injuries. “Come here,” he said hoarsely. “Please.”

Niall clambered up beside him and made himself small against Harry’s less injured side, holding his hand, breathing unevenly into the warm skin of his neck.

“I thought you’d be dead,” he said, feeling stupid even as he said it. “They said… I booked the plane before they knew how bad it was, I thought maybe… I don’t know. I thought I’d get here too late and I’d never see you again.”

He was humbled in the shadow of Harry’s mortality. They were both such temporary things, so vain to believe in their own importance. Niall was a collection of limbs and nerves and thoughts that may carry on existing for another sixty years, or may not, and what did falling in love matter in the broad scope of the infinite universe?

Then again, what could possibly matter more?

“I love you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Now that he was laying down, and Harry’s good arm was around him, stroking his hair, tethering him to the physical reality they shared, Niall could feel the adrenaline draining out of him. He fell asleep cradling Harry’s bruised body as close as he could. They breathed together, in, and then out. It was all they could do.


End file.
